Author Emiko Jean has followed up her first thriller The Return of Ellie Black (reviewed here) with another book featuring police detective Chelsea Calhoun and horrific, female-centered crimes. Before You Were Anne takes readers from Japan to Idaho to Seattle, tracing one woman’s experiences with men who betray her and the detective who tries to solve the mystery before another woman dies.
When a Japanese woman is found murdered and her sixteen-year-old daughter kidnapped, Chelsea feels a special connection to the case. Of Japanese ancestry herself, Chelsea was adopted by a white family after being left at a fire station as a baby. Now pregnant, Chelsea is determined to find who killed Anne—who was called Rika in Japan—and took Naomi. At the same time, new questions arise about her own background. Is Chelsea too distracted to save Naomi and find Anne’s killer?
Before You Were Anne is told from three perspectives—Chelsea and Naomi’s in third person, and Anne’s in second person. The choice of second person for Anne ties in nicely with the structure of the title, and perhaps Jean thought it would make the reader identify with Anne more easily. I found the choice to be off-putting: Every time Jean used the word “you,” I thought to myself, “No, I would never do that.” These sections narrate Anne’s life and illustrate the many bad decisions that led to her murder. From her teenage years to her death, Anne is naïve and trusting and never learns from her mistakes. But her vulnerability makes her easy to root for, and her death is tragic.
Naomi’s questioning of her past is the catalyst that leads to her mother’s death, and while Chelsea doesn’t know this, the reader does, and their similarities make the book feel thematically consistent. By the end, Chelsea learns about Naomi’s investigations, and she wonders how much to delve into her own background. It’s a nice segue for the next book.
More broadly, though, Jean’s world view as expressed by the Chelsea Calhoun books is seriously dark. She’s not a graphic writer, which I appreciate, and the reader is spared gory scenes that her setups imply. The first book dealt with a misogynistic cult and this one also features systemic abuse. Calhoun lives in a scary world where no one can be trusted. It’s troubling to think that it’s also ours.
Thanks to Simon and Schuster for the book in exchange for an honest review.
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