[Review] Before She Disappeared - Lisa Gardner

Summary: Frankie Elkin is an average middle-aged woman, a recovering alcoholic with more regrets than belongings. But she spends her life doing what no one else will--searching for missing people the world has stopped looking for. When the police have given up, when the public no longer remembers, when the media has never paid attention, Frankie starts looking.

A new case brings her to Mattapan, a Boston neighborhood with a rough reputation. She is searching for Angelique Badeau, a Haitian teenager who vanished from her high school months earlier. Resistance from the Boston PD and the victim's wary family tells Frankie she's on her own--and she soon learns she's asking questions someone doesn't want answered. But Frankie will stop at nothing to discover the truth, even if it means the next person to go missing could be her. (Pub Date: Jan 19 2021)

I'm aware of how famous Lisa Gardner is but I believe this was my first time. 

3.5 rounded up.

Frankie has a weird way to deal with guilt, she helps families find their missing ones even though she's not in the police force or anything alike. She's just a middle-aged white woman with good intuition. Her new case is of a black refugee girl that disappeared almost a year before. No one knows who would take her and everything points to her deliberately running away, but that's not what Frankie thinks. 

Although I kinda liked Frankie and actually liked the policeman investigating, it took me long to get into this story. We already know the girl didn't just up and left but we spend half the book gathering proof she actually did so, which felt counterproductive. In crude words what I kept thinking was, what's the point? You can see how it was indeed a mystery, that I can't deny. After the first half, things finally happen and I finally could feel the thrill from the story. 

The conclusion is excellent and the story was involving. It's been some time I finished and I still feel for the characters, for most of them at least. I liked how everything was linked and how it made sense that the police wouldn't easily find it out—though a part of it was just dumb police work, as usual for these investigative reads. 

It's still slow for too long so I can only recommend it to those who won't mind betting a little more than usual of their time and giving it a chance.

Honest review based on an ARC provided by Netgalley. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.

Rating: 4 out of 5.