Frankie Elkin

About the Frankie Elkin series

Frankie Elkin is a recovering alcoholic who spends her life finding missing people nobody else is looking for — usually people of color, poor, or otherwise overlooked by police and the media — funding her search for one case with bartending money until she's ready to move to the next. Lisa Gardner introduced her in Before She Disappeared, working a Boston neighborhood to find a missing Haitian teenager, and the format has repeated with variations ever since: Frankie arrives in a new town with nothing, ingratiates herself with locals, and works a cold or overlooked case that the authorities have given up on or never properly investigated.

Each book moves Frankie to a new setting and a new kind of case — a remote wilderness search-and-rescue town in One Step Too Far, a serial-killer cold case tangled up with true-crime obsessives in Still See You Everywhere, and a missing Afghan refugee in Kiss Her Goodbye — while steadily filling in Frankie's own backstory: her sobriety, a sister she couldn't save, and the guilt that drives her from case to case. Gardner uses the format to foreground exactly the kind of victim mainstream crime fiction and news coverage tend to skip past, which gives the series a sharper social edge than her earlier procedurals.

It's a good entry point for readers new to Gardner altogether — no series history required, no returning cast beyond Frankie herself, and a fresh premise reset with every book.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with Before She Disappeared (2021). Each book is a self-contained case in a new location, so there's no ongoing investigation to track between entries — but Frankie's own backstory (her sobriety, her missing sister, why she does this work) is gradually revealed across the series and lands better with the earlier books read first. New readers can, in a pinch, start anywhere, though Before She Disappeared is still the best introduction to who Frankie is and why she lives the way she does.