Before she disappeared

 Before she disappeared by Lisa Gardner  383 pgs

Summary from Goodreads:Frankie Elkin is an average middle-aged woman, a recovering alcoholic with more regrets than belongings. But she spends her life doing what no one else will--searching for missing people the world has stopped looking for. When the police have given up, when the public no longer remembers, when the media has never paid attention, Frankie starts looking.

A new case brings her to Mattapan, a Boston neighborhood with a rough reputation. She is searching for Angelique Badeau, a Haitian teenager who vanished from her high school months earlier. Resistance from the Boston PD and the victim's wary family tells Frankie she's on her own--and she soon learns she's asking questions someone doesn't want answered. But Frankie will stop at nothing to discover the truth, even if it means the next person to go missing could be her. 

And here's what I thought: I really liked this story and found the characters believable and easy to envision. Frankie isn't a perfect person, and that's actually the point --- she's not necessarily special or gifted, but she is stubborn and has found her purpose in life. I appreciated that this wasn't a police procedural to find a missing person, but instead a regular person who is just determined and who will try her best to work with the police (or not, actually).  The gritty setting is as much a part of the story as anything else, which I also liked.