I’m about to go out on a limb, stay tuned. First, the book’s summary.

In The Return of Ellie Black by Emiko Jean, Chelsey Calhoun has lived the last fifteen years with the loss of her sister, who died after being abducted. Now, Chelsey is a detective, with a focus on missing girls. So when Elizabeth “Ellie” Black abruptly is found in the woods, after being missing for two years, Chelsey jumps on the case. But Ellie is clearly traumatized, and refuses to cooperate with the investigation. Something seems strange, though, and Chelsey can’t quite let the case go. The more she investigates, the more she starts to wonder if Ellie’s hiding something, or lying to protect someone.

Okay, here we go. I’ll say first that yes, this is a good book, mostly. The characters are well formed, their development makes sense, and the themes about loss and trauma are heart-wrenching. However, if I’d written this, I would have done something different. Not to say I know better than the author, who I’m a fan of (this is the fourth book I’ve read by her, after all), but I made the mistake of trying to solve this. I shouldn’t have. I became so focused on building my own case against a certain character, built on what I can now accept was entirely circumstantial evidence, that I failed to be open-minded about any other character’s potential guilt. But I have to say, it was so fun to do. And honestly, I think my idea would have been better than the actual whodunit.

Then again, I suppose my idea has already been done in a certain BBC tv show set in Scotland. I don’t want to specifically name it without giving away who I thought did it in this book. Still, I stand by my opinion that I should have been right!

Okay. Now that that’s off my chest (though I could go on and on about why I suspected that character, and why it would have been a better solution), I’ll talk about the actual book. Firstly, I do enjoy that the audiobook has a full cast. (Though it brings up the question I have these days: why, when there’s a full cast, don’t we just go full radio play and have those narrators do all their lines, even when the scene is from a different character’s POV?) Everyone does a good job, though I have to say, the narrator for Chelsey’s scenes was too monotone for my taste. It felt odd, given the context, to sound that way, and I had a hard time staying engaged for parts of those scenes.

As for the other narrators, they’re great, especially Ellie’s. Then again, her scenes are the most compelling, in a dark way. It’s absolutely harrowing to see her abduction and time she spends held captive. This is also where I should note that there is violence against teenagers, including physical and sexual abuse, as well as lots of psychological manipulation. Ellie’s captors are the absolute worst, so easy to hate and horrible to read about. This certainly isn’t an easy book, but the dark parts are somewhat balanced by Ellie’s growing bond with the other girls she’s with, and their sisterhood as they try to protect themselves and each other. I liked seeing that in such a terrible situation, people can still be kind to each other.

Speaking of sisterhood, that’s one of the main themes of the book. It’s interesting to see the different forms this can take. There’s Chelsey’s close bond with her sister, then her grief in losing her at a young age. Then there’s Ellie’s aforementioned relationship with the other kidnapped girls, as well as her distant but vaguely fond feelings toward her older sister, separated as they are by a decade-long age gap. Clearly family relationships is something that Jean likes to explore in her writing, and it’s brought to the forefront here, showing the darker side of sibling relationships. How far would you go for your sibling, Jean seems to be asking, and what does it even mean to be a sibling?

In the end, I think that if you enjoy thrillers, The Return of Ellie Black isn’t a bad one to try. It’s definitely darker and more intense than most books I prefer, with plenty of content warnings that some people would justifiably want to avoid. But there are plenty of good characters, excellent scenes of action and/or character development, and a solid mystery running throughout. I wish the third act plot twist had been entirely different, and I personally felt let down by it—but again, this might just be a personal problem. If you read this, my advice for enjoying this book more is as follows: Don’t find a suspect less than thirty pages in, or if you do, don’t stick with it like I did. Unless, unlike me, you pick the same person the author did. In which case, kudos to you.

(But my idea was still better. Sorry!)