If Lisa Gardner can already count on a large pool of unconditional readers, this new thriller will convince both those who have never been big fans of her work and those who have never read it.
The American author was inspired for this novel by the true story of an “ordinary” woman who follows in the footsteps of missing people. “When the police gave up, when the media was never interested, when everyone forgot, that’s where I come in,” says his character Frankie Elkin. This time she arrives in Mattapan, an area of Boston where many gangs live, to try to find a teenage girl who has been missing for almost a year. An alcoholic in remission, Frankie Elkin fights fiercely against her demons and her memories, “burning embers” that she never stops rehashing. All the mastery of this thriller lies precisely in the complexity of its heroine; it is not so much the investigation surrounding the disappearance that carries us – although it is quite captivating – but the desire to get to the source of the trauma of this amateur detective who attracts the wrath of the police officers, as well as his discovery (and ours) of a Boston neighborhood that has never made the news for good reasons. It is also said that this title marks the beginning of a new series; one thing is certain, we can only be there for the next ones after reading this one.
The summer before
Albin Michel
448 pages