by Emiko Jean ★★★★☆
A young woman emerges from a Washington forest, covered in mud, bone-thin, and wearing a blood-stained sweatshirt. She is found by a pair of hikers, who ask who she is, and she responds "My name is Elizabeth Black. I think I'm missing."
Chelsey Calhoun is the detective who was originally assigned to Elizabeth "Ellie" Black's missing persons case, and so she's dispatched to the hospital and is one of the first to lay eyes on the newly-found young woman. It turns out that it is in fact Ellie Black. She's in rough physical shape and suffering from post-traumatic stress—sensitive to light, and always looking for a way out of an enclosed room—but it's her. Chelsey starts to work to unravel what happened to this poor girl, gently, at first, but then with increasing urgency once Chelsey realizes that Ellie may be the key to unlocking other missing persons cases, including one in which the victim may still be alive.
The only problem is that Ellie Black isn't especially interested in helping Chelsey solve anything. Talking about her experience is highly distressing for Ellie, and eventually she decides enough is enough. Even with lives potentially at risk, Ellie wants nothing to do with the case, or with Detective Calhoun.
The Return of Ellie Black focuses on the underlying mystery of Ellie's disappearance and unearthing the identity of her abductor, but Ellie's caginess suggests that there is more to the story, an additional layer of trauma beyond the abduction that she's not willing to share. The novel bounces between Detective Calhoun's present-time pursuit of clues to the case and first-person in-the-moment accounts from Ellie chronicling her abduction and captivity. As Chelsey gets closer to cracking the case—even without Ellie's help—and Ellie reveals more about her captivity, the dual timelines blend nicely to gradually and effectively unveil the truth to the reader.
The novel explores the physical, mental, and emotional trauma of an abduction, and it does so in fairly stark detail. The segments of the book in which Ellie recounts her captivity make up the most difficult and uncomfortable portions of the book and can make it a challenging read at times. Author Emiko Jean focuses on the victims (Ellie and others), of course, but also does a commendable job delving into the impact that an event like this can have on victims' families. We also get to experience the hodgepodge of confused emotions brought on by Ellie's return after hope had long been abandoned. Everyone Ellie encounters is walking on eggshells, and no one is quite sure how to interact, be it Ellie's nuclear family, her old boyfriend, or most of all Ellie herself.
There's more to this one than the average thriller, and it stacks up well against some of my favorites in the genre from this year. There are a few weird misses in the book—Chesley's initial meetup with her eventual husband and their relationship is unrealistically rendered—but this hit the mark far more often than not, with a few solid twists along the way, leading to a high 4-star rating from me. If you can get past the difficulty of reading about the abduction and imprisonment of several young women, it's a very solid mystery and a great page-turner to bring with you on an upcoming vacation.
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