It was around this time last year when I reviewed Lisa Gardner’s When You See Me, and in January 2018 Look For Me came under the Fully Booked microscope. These both featured the ‘odd couple’ Flora Dane and DD Warren, but this January the New Hampshire author has produced a standalone thriller – Before She Disappeared.
Centre stage is a woman called Frankie Elkins. She is middle-aged and a recovering alcoholic. Her purpose in life is to find missing people. People who have been taken. People who have just walked away into oblivion. People who the police have made an effort to find, but have given up. This mission may remind British readers of the David Raker books by Tim Weaver (click the link to read more), but Frankie is rather different in that she doesn’t work for a fee. She follows cases on internet message boards and then just ups sticks, and with all her belongings in a suitcase heads of to where the trail went cold. I have to say that this was, initially, a fairly improbable premise. Frankie seems to have no money, little other than the clothes she stands up in, so why would she do this? Stay with it, though, like I did, and there will be an explanation. She carries the burden of a terrible trauma, and Lisa Gardner teases us about its actual nature until quite late in the story, and when we learn what happened, the past has a terrible resonance with the present.
In Before She Disappeared, Frankie goes to Boston, but this isn’t the upper crust Boston of the Kennedy dynasty, Leonard Bernstein or Harvard. She heads for Mattapan, a hard-scrabble and tumbledown district home to thousands of Haitians and other refugees from strife, poverty and natural disasters. Her mission? To find out what happened to Angelique Badeau, The Haitian teenager had been living with her aunt, sent to America after an earthquake devastated her home. One day she set of for school as normal, and nothing has been seen or heard of her since.
As a white woman in Mattapan Frankie is something of a curiosity, but she takes a job in a bar and slowly makes friends. The downside is that as her probing into Angelique’s disappearance starts to uncover some dark secrets, she also makes some serious – and deadly – enemies.
Frankie gains the begrudging trust of a local cop, Detective Lotham, and the pair begin to generate a certain electricity between them. This is, of course, a very handy – but perfectly plausible – plot device,as it enable Frankie to have access to all kinds of information, such as CCTV footage which, as a civilian she would otherwise not have.
The problem for Frankie is that Angelique was almost too good to be true. Studious, punctual, respectful, no boyfriend interest and certainly no connection to the local gangs, there seems to neither rhyme nor reason behind her disappearance. Then, after a more thorough search of the Badeau’s apartment Frankie makes a shocking discovery. She finds a huge stash of cash hidden in the hollow base of a standard lamp. When most of these bills are found to be rather good forgeries, the case swerves in a totally different direction.
I had in the back of my mind the comment, “a typical American thriller.” This is in no way derogatory. In the best of these books there is a slickness, a tight control over the flow of events, a sense of darkness that gives an edge without being too disturbing, and a cinematic quality. Before She Disappeared certainly fits into this slot. It is taut, sharply original and very, very readable. It is published by Century/Penguin Random House and is out now.
ver the years, missing persons investigator David Raker has, courtesy of his creator Tim Weaver, solved some perplexing cases. There was the man who disappeared into the bowels of London’s underground railway system, the amnesiac who was found on a deserted south coast shingle beach, the straight ‘A’ student with the secret life who just vanishes and, memorably, the time his dead wife walked into a London police station and back into his life. Raker tends to be looking for troubled individuals, as in just the one person. But this time it’s different.
A whole village has disappeared. OK, let’s put that into context. The village is the isolated moorland community of Black Gale, and it consists of a farm and three expensive and fairly recent houses arrayed in a semi-circle around the older building. Black Gale. Population, nine souls. And on Halloween, two years since, they vanished. Into thin air. Like Prospero’s insubstantial pageant, the four families have left not a rack behind.
aker has problems of his own, principally in the shape of his long time friend, former police officer Colm Healy. Healy featured in the very first Raker mystery Vanished (2012) and his misfortunes have been ever present over the series (No One Home is the 10th book). Healy is officially dead – and buried, He has a gravestone to prove it, but for a variety of reasons the former copper now exists under a variety of aliases, under the protection of David Raker. A persistent and intrusive journalist wants to write Raker’s life story, but also suspects the truth about Healey, and uses his knowledge in an attempt to force Raker to co-operate. Keeping the hack at bay – just – Raker begins to unpick the mystery of Black Gale.
ans of the series will know that Tim Weaver doesn’t like Raker’s cases to be geographically confined, and so it is that the Black Gale conundrum is linked with a grisly unsolved murder in a flyblown California motel decades earlier. I say “unsolved”. The local Sheriff’s Department think the case is a wrap. They have a vic and a perp and have moved on to other things. Detective Joline Kader, however, has other ideas. She is unconvinced that the body lying face down in a bathtub of muriatic acid is simply the victim of a drug deal gone wrong, and the case stays with her over the years, right through her police career and her subsequent vocation as a college lecturer. Right up until the moment where her old obsession collides with David Raker’s fatal unpicking of a very clever and murderous conspiracy.
No One Home is a brilliant thriller. It runs to over 500 pages, with not a single one wasted. The action is constant and the plot spins about all over the place, so you will need to be on your mettle to keep track of what is going on. Tim Weaver (right) has never been shy of creating apparently improbable conundrums for Raker to solve, and this is no exception. Suspend your disbelief for a few hours and go with the flow. I read it in three intense sessions and although I don’t use “Wow!” in normal speech, it certainly applies here. No One Home is published by Penguin 
But he has, as far as is possible, moved on. He has an unexpected family in the form of a daughter from an early relationship, and he keeps his chin up and his eyes bright. Because to do otherwise would mean self destruction, and he owes the physically absent but ever-present spirit of Derryn that much. His world, however, and such stability as he has been able to build into it, is rocked on its axis when a woman turns up at a West End police station claiming to be his wife. Derryn. Dead and buried these nine years. Her fragile remains consigned to the earth. He sees the woman through a viewing screen at the police station and he is astonished. In front of him sits his late wife, the love of his life, and the woman for whom he has shed nine years of tears.
So many questions. The answers do come, and the whole journey is great fun – but occasionally nerve racking and full of tension. Tim Weaver (right) has crafted yet another brilliant piece of entertainment, and placed a further brick in the wall built for people who know that there is nothing more riveting, nothing more calculated to shut out the real world and nothing more breathtaking than a good book.
fullybooked2017 