the key to locating missing people
Frankie Elkin is back on the case and heading for Arizona. After a couple of harrowing experiences, she is ready to start a new missing persons case, and the one that caught her soul was that of Sabera Ahmadi.
Frankie is not a detective or an agent of the police or a lettered bureau. She’s just a recovered alcoholic who has found that she functions best in service, and her service is looking for those people who have gone missing. When others have stopped looking, she steps in. And a friend of Sabera has contacted Frankie and made a case.
Sabera is a recent Afghan refugee, having arrived in Tucson with her husband and 3-year-old daughter. Her friend Aliah hadn’t seen Sabera in three weeks. She had gone missing first. Then someone had shown up with a delivery for her husband, a box, and as soon as he opened it, he had left the house. He hadn’t been seen since. A friend had been watching Sabera’s daughter Zahra ever since, but men showed up and tried to take her also. Aliah doesn’t believe that Sabera would leave her daughter behind willingly, and she doesn’t have anyone to turn to, except Frankie.
But before Frankie can dive into the case, she has to find a place to stay. She tries to find a job with housing included, and ends up answering an ad for a house/petsitter. She is hired immediately, which causes her some concern, but she doesn’t have many options. There is a housing shortage, and she doesn’t have much money to spend on a place. Bart, the owner of the house, sends his driver to pick her up.
When she gets to the house, she finds a massive house with a swimming pool. And that’s when she gets to meet Petunia, the iguana she’s being hired to feed and watch television with each night. And then she meets the baby ball pythons. Just a dozen of them. And then Marge, the 5-foot long Burmese python. Frankie doesn’t love snakes, and she is seriously anxious about feeding them. But what choice does she have? Bart, a tech bro, is heading out of town for a month and needs someone there to tend to his pets. So Frankie has to swallow her fear and hang out with an iguana and feed some snakes. But for that, she gets a beautiful poolside bungalow, driver Daryl, and housekeeper/cook Genni.
Frankie jumps right into the case, meeting with Aliah and the social workers who worked with the Ahmadi family. She finds herself learning a lot quickly about the experience of refugees coming to America, especially from Afghanistan. She meets Zahra and learns that this family is truly special. Sabera was a linguist. Her husband was a mathematical genius. And their daughter remembers everything she sees.
As Frankie digs into Sabera’s past, she finds family secrets, time in a refugee camp where she helped others but almost lost her life as well as the life is her unborn child, a complicated code written on walls, dead men in a warehouse, and so many questions. But Frankie keeps pushing, and as she breaks through with small moments of understanding, she finds that she has more allies helping solve the case than she expected. And one of those allies just may turn out to be a Burmese python.
Kiss Her Goodbye is book 4 in Lisa Gardner’s Frankie Elkin series. Frankie is one of my favorite characters, so I loved this book. But it was not easy to read. Learning of the plight of refugees was a difficult journey, and watching how Frankie always takes the hardest road for herself gets painful. But I have to keep reading anyway. I love the mix of characters in this one, and the friends Frankie made, who stood beside her and helped try to locate this missing woman, were strong and funny and tended to steal the scenes they were in. Petunia even stole a couple of her scenes, and I was not expecting that from an iguana. Kiss Her Goodbye is not for someone wanting a quick, frivolous read. But it was worth the time I spent with it, and I will be just sitting around waiting for the next next adventure Frankie takes me on.
Egalleys for Kiss Her Goodbye were provided by Grand Central Publishing through NetGalley, with many thanks, but the opinions are mine.
