Book Review: The Return of Ellie Black by Emiko Jean

Reader, how I gasped! I go through a lot of mystery novels and thrillers, so very few plot twists truly surprise me anymore. The Return Of Ellie Black, however, had me almost completely wrong-footed throughout. I can hardly believe that this is Emiko Jean’s debut thriller. It’s so perfectly plotted and seeded, and I fell for every single red herring she wrote into her story. What a terrific way to kick off the thriller-writing aspect of an already solid fiction-writing career!

Which, of course, leads me to fear accidentally giving away any spoilers while discussing this absolute page-turner of a novel. What I can safely say is that our heroine Chelsey Calhoun became a cop to follow in her police chief father’s footsteps. She joined the police force of her Coldwell, Washington, hometown and worked her way up to the position of detective in its Family Services department. So she’s the investigator to call when 19-year-old Ellie Black, missing for the past two years, suddenly emerges from the Capitol State Forest. Chelsey had originally caught the missing persons case back when Ellie first disappeared. Ellie’s parents, Kat and Jimmy, had done everything they could to help Chelsey bring Ellie home to them, including volunteering as much information about their daughter as possible:

All these details to show how special Ellie was. Proof she deserved to be searched for, to be found. There was no way Kat could know a dollar figure was attached to each case. A careful calculation multiplied by parents’ wealth, then divided by race and religion. The poorer and darker a girl, the less funds and time the department allocated to her rescue–after all, the public is a little less outraged when those types of girls go missing. Maybe Ellie’s mom could sense it–some daughters were worth more than others. This was not a viewpoint Chelsey subscribed to. But it was a reality, even if she didn’t want to believe it.

Chelsey isn’t jaded, but she has grimly realistic expectations of the world around her that leave little room for optimism. While this makes her a good investigator, it doesn’t improve her less-than-stellar people skills, whether on the job or in her personal life. Being the adopted Japanese daughter of a very white family never helped with that either, especially when she was growing up. Her adoptive parents did their best, but it was really their birth daughter, her older sister Lydia, who made her feel safe and accepted and just a smidge less like a social outcast. 

Lydia’s disappearance when they were teenagers was thus an especially crushing blow for Chelsey, even before the confirmation of Lydia’s death tore their family apart. In order to cope, their father taught Chelsey self-defense and wilderness survival skills, lessons she embraced, though not entirely without reservations:

It had been a relief, getting away like that, escaping to the woods with a gun. Her mom was a wreck. And the kids at school stared at her. She’d felt so alien. Lydia had been Chelsey’s home planet; without her sister, Chelsey was adrift. But often, Chelsey wondered if her father, if people in general, should spend less time protecting daughters and more time worrying about sons. The dangerous things boys do. How they might be raised differently. She’d mentioned something similar to her father once, and he’d gazed at her hard, then said even harder, I don’t have any sons.

Now an adult, Chelsey feels duty-bound to help find and save girls who’ve vanished, just like Lydia and Ellie did. At first, she’s ecstatic that, unlike her own sister, Ellie has managed to come home alive. She soon suspects, however, that something isn’t quite right about the story Ellie is telling. As the days pass and the evidence mounts, Chelsey begins to believe that Ellie is keeping terrible, dangerous secrets and that other girls are still at risk. Will Chelsey be able to get Ellie to talk about what really happened to her before anyone else gets hurt?

This was an excellent thriller that had me gasping in shock, both at the extremely clever plot twists and in sheer admiration of Ms. Jean’s storytelling skill. Told from multiple viewpoints that shift back and forth in time, the layered construction of this book has been done with both exquisite delicacy and a keen eye for maximum drama. Perhaps most important, however, is the commitment to sisterhood and survival that permeates this sensitive exploration of what it means to be a victim in the 21st century, to always feel culpable in your own abuse, and to have to fight to reclaim what should never have been taken from you in the first place. Despite the misgivings I had regarding some of Chelsey’s choices as a cop in the last third of the book, this was by far one of the best-written and most affecting thrillers I’ve read this year so far.