I don’t believe I’ve ever read a Lisa Gardner book before, but this one was pretty good! When I purchased it, I didn’t realize that it’s actually the third in a series following main character, Frankie Elkin, who is a self taught expert on finding missing persons. The trouble is, she hasn’t been finding them alive lately and she could really use a win. This is about the same time she’s contacted to assist in finding a woman’s sister. The woman in question? “The Beautiful Butcher”–Keahei. She needs help finding her sister, whom she hasn’t seen in over 12 years when her husband absconded with her while Keahei was recovering in the hospital after a domestic dispute. Now on Death Row and scheduled to be executed for 18 gruesome murders she wants to find closure and get word to her sister after receiving a letter from her. Frankie must relocate to a sparsely occupied atoll and pretend to help set up a fancy eco-resort while getting close to Keahei’s sister Lani to let her know that she’s there to save her from the wealthy businessman Sanders MacManus, the man who has raised Lani/the man who had kidnapped Lani all those years ago. That’s all I’m going to tell you.
This is a popcorn book, not great literary fiction. If you spend too much time on the plot, you can poke a lot of holes and find unbelievability pretty quickly, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying it any less than I would enjoy a movie like Con Air. Since it was the third book, there were small callbacks to things that I wasn’t privy to, which made no difference to the plot, but did probably add to the character development of the protagonist. At first, I was a little critical of that development, but now knowing it’s a series, the author can’t rehash the old info and must continue to build. I also enjoyed that the author researched this novel by taking a full year off of writing (something her family didn’t think she could do) and traveling to places she always wanted to visit. Some of these places come into play in this novel either briefly, Antarctica, or featured heavily, an isolated atoll in the Pacific. I may pick up the first two books to see what I’ve been missing.