Still See You Everywhere

Frankie Elkin is an unusual woman. A recovering alcoholic, she feels guilty that her addiction caused the death of a man she loved. This guilt drives her to atone for her past by looking for missing people. She doesn’t live anywhere in particular, moving from one case to the next.

In this third episode, Frankie has traveled overnight by bus to Gatesville, Texas, to a jail for female death row prisoners. She is there to meet Keahi Pierson, a serial killer nicknamed ‘the Beautiful Butcher’, known for luring eighteen men to her home before killing and dismembering them and feeding them to her pigs. In her thirties, Keahi is beautiful, with long dark hair and golden skin that testifies to her Hawaiian heritage. She is not repentant and wants to die, but before her execution in twenty-one days, she wants Frankie to find her missing sister, Lea.

When she turned eighteen, Keahi took four-year-old Lea from their abusive father and ran away to relatives in Hawaii. Unfortunately, she fell in love with Sanders MacManus, another abusive man, who would fight violently with her. One day she woke up in the hospital to find Lea gone and MacManus claiming she had run away. Unable to find any trace of her, she eventually returned to Texas and began her killing spree. However, recently receiving a letter from Lea, she now wants to know that she is safe.

To get close to MacManus and find out if he has Lea, Frankie takes a job as a housekeeper on Pomaikai, a small atoll near Honolulu, that MacManus, now a tech billionaire, bought to develop into an ecolodge. He visits regularly, so as a housekeeper, Frankie will be able to get close to him and look for Lea.

In her afterword, Lisa Gardner describes how she based her fictional island on Palmyra, an atoll she visited during a writing sabbatical. She describes it as an amazing place, wild and beautiful, inhabited by large land crabs, wolf spiders, and exotic birds in a lush, dense rainforest. Hot and humid and subject to tropical storms, Pomaikai’s isolation means it has to be self-sufficient in terms of water and electricity, with food flown in regularly. The staff is composed of a mix of kitchen and cleaning staff, a scientist, an architect, an engineer to keep everything running, and a project manager.

While the first half of the book sets the scene, fleshing out the characters and some troubling incidents of sabotage, it’s like the calm before the storm with all hell about to break loose after MacManus arrives, just ahead of a tropical storm that cuts them off from outside communication. A major, totally unique, out of left field twist ramps up the suspense to maximum. While what follows might be stretching plausibility as over-the-top chaos ensues, Gardner nevertheless takes us on a wild and crazy, action-packed ride that many of her fans will love.

With thanks to the publisher for a copy to read.