Kiss Her Goodbye

Frankie Elkin is particularly talented at finding missing people that no one else has been able to locate. A recovering alcoholic, she lives a nomadic lifestyle, traveling from place to place when asked to find someone who has disappeared. She expects no recompense for her skills and lives simply, with little baggage.

Tough, intuitive, and resilient, she is always prepared to go the extra mile to find the lost.

In this fourth installment in the series, Frankie travels to Tucson, Arizona, in response to a request to find a missing Afghan refugee, Sabera Ahmadi. She disappeared three weeks earlier from her home with her husband, Isaad, and four-year-old daughter, Zahra. The family is newly arrived in Tucson after spending four years in a refugee camp in Abu Dhabi, following the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban.

Seeking somewhere cheap to live while in Tucson, Frankie takes a job with free accommodation in a mansion, along with a driver, a car, and a cook who’s a wizard in the kitchen. All she has to do in return is look after a tech millionaire’s reptile collection—several pythons and a giant iguana—for a month. The only problem is, Frankie doesn’t like reptiles, particularly snakes, and now she has no choice but to get up close to feed them.

Sabera has not been seen at her job as a maid in a resort hotel, and she is not answering her phone. Her husband says he has no idea why she would run away or where she might have gone. However, when Sabera is sighted in a video on the news, leaving the scene of a double murder—and then Isaad also disappears—Frankie begins to suspect that the Ahmadi family is in a whole lot of trouble. They’ve only been in Tucson a few weeks, so could it stem back to their life in Kabul and the past they thought they had left behind?

Gardner’s research into the life Sabera would have lived in Afghanistan is thorough and feels realistic. Her heartbreaking depictions of the desperation of those trying to flee Kabul after the Taliban arrived—followed by life in overcrowded camps—are told with empathy and compassion. She also shines a light on the difficulties refugees encounter in trying to start a new life in America, with only a few weeks of financial support to find housing and work.

There are multiple layers to the plot, and the reason for Sabera’s disappearance takes a while to come into focus, but the tension is palpable as we wonder if she will be found alive. The darkness caused by the danger to Sabera and her family is offset by the introduction of some colorful, larger-than-life secondary characters, as well as Frankie’s less-than-expert experiences in looking after the reptiles. This is a gritty and immersive read that could easily be read as a stand-alone.

With thanks to Grand Central Publishing for a copy to read.