Item: The Return of Ellie Black
Rating: 4.5
Author: Catherine

The Return of Ellie Black by Emiko Jean
Published by Simon & Schuster
Publication date: May 7, 2024
Genres: Book Clubs, Fiction, Mystery, Suspense

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A father and son hiking in the forest in Southwestern WA encounter a young woman, emaciated and bruised. Her name is Elizabeth Black and she’s been missing for two years. This is the attention-grabbing opening of Emiko Jean’s new novel The Return of Ellie Black, a tactic she uses superbly right up until the end of this slow burn suspense novel.

Ellie’s return brings joy to her waiting family, but questions and tension to Chelsey, the local detective assigned to the case. Her time in captivity has left her so traumatized she refuses to talk to anyone and acts as if she were still a prisoner. She sleeps on the floor in a tiny crawl space and refuses to get her hair cut because “I’m not allowed.” Chelsey’s compassion battles with her determination for closure due to a tragedy in her past. Her older sister was murdered 20 years ago in a crime of passion, but her body was never recovered. Now as inconsistencies and unanswered questions pileup around Ellie’s reappearance Chelsey feels an intense pressure to solve the case and potentially save other young women.

Initially, The Return of Ellie Black is told in the present, allowing the reader to settle into the story, before chapters in Ellie’s voice appear, going all the way back to the night she vanished. These chapters are told in the first person and from the very beginning they’re startling in the way they reflect a teenage girl looking back from where she is now and seeing the mistakes she’s made. She recounts her time as a prisoner in graphic detail, sharing with the reader the information Chelsey so desperately seeks.

But then, I learned. I learned that I didn’t need shackles or chains to keep me bound. All I needed was four walls of pristine forest. And fear. The kind that festers and blisters, makes your limbs twitch. Yes. The best prisons are the ones created in our own minds.

Jean wisely alternates these chapters of Ellie’s as they’re not only too harrowing to go on unbroken, but would also reveal the mystery Chelsey’s trying to solve before its time.

In the same way, Jean enlists the environment as a character. For Chelsey, the forest is comforting or at least a place she knows well enough to feel safe, but for Ellie it’s another enemy. These choices in The Return of Ellie Black are so skillfully executed that they work as a carefully laid ambush in the plot. An event as the novel nears its end is so completely unexpected, I could almost hear the SNAP of the trap closing around me. This wasn’t due to its implausibility, but how subtly Jean had lured the reader into a belief in events as she laid them out. If slow-burn, atmospheric, and psychological drama are keywords in your search for a thriller then look no further than The Return of Ellie Black.

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