Frankie Elkin

Frankie Elkin is the missing persons investigator protagonist of Lisa Gardner's Frankie Elkin series — a recovering alcoholic who volunteers her time to search for missing people, particularly those from marginalized communities whose disappearances receive little official attention or media coverage. The series is a deliberate engagement with the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis and the broader problem of whose disappearances society chooses to prioritize.

Gardner writes Frankie as a character defined by her past failures and her present commitment to doing something that matters — the alcoholism she manages daily, the relationships she has damaged, and the cases she takes without payment or recognition give her a moral seriousness that distinguishes her from conventional thriller protagonists. Her work on cases involving Indigenous women is handled with research depth and genuine respect for the communities she enters.

The Frankie Elkin series represents Gardner's most socially engaged fiction, using the thriller format to draw attention to real systemic failures in how missing persons cases are investigated and reported. Begin with Before She Disappeared and read in publication order.