she takes a case in a new area, she has to find some income and lodging. (No driving around in a fancy RV like Colter Shaw in Tracker.)

Frankie’s current case takes her to Tucson, AZ, where an Afghan immigrant named Sabeera disappeared three weeks earlier, leaving behind a considerably older husband and a precocious four-year-old daughter, Zahra. Sabeera and her family fled Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover in 2021 and lived in resettlement camps until being placed in Tucson. She and her husband took on menial jobs, despite their higher education, until she disappeared while waiting at a bus stop on the way home from work one night. An older Afghan woman who had emigrated to the United States decades earlier and befriended Sabeera when she arrived in Tucson contacted Frankie. (Kiss Her Goodbye is understandably vague on details about how this occurred.)

Frankie’s first job is to find a place to live, and she solves that problem in the first of the book’s endless stream of lucky breaks. She answers a Craigslist-type ad and becomes a live-in caregiver for a wealthy, eccentric game developer’s pet iguana and baby pythons. (Frankie’s efforts to feed and bond with the reptiles are a source of unfunny humor in the story.) In addition to room and lodging, Frankie gets the help of the gamer’s chauffeur, Daryl. He’s an ex-con with some convenient muscles and even more convenient acquaintances like his parole officer and an actually helpful cop.

As a mystery, Kiss Her Goodbye resembles an Agatha Christie puzzler more than a typical PI procedural. The story is filled with cryptic clues, such as young Zahra telling Frankie: “A lock to a key for a key that has no lock. You must find it.” The solution to Sabeera’s disappearance involves events that took place years earlier in Afghanistan and other Afghans now in the United States. It’s quite far-fetched in terms of real-world credibility, but I was able to buy into the mystery’s entire premise and the meaning of the various clues.

What I had more trouble buying into was the incredibly good luck Frankie had in assembling an effective resource network in the days when she started out with the one friend Sabeera had in Tucson. Everyone Frankie meets provides valuable help and is more than willing to help her. That’s especially true in the dream job requiring little genuine work, which she lands in a couple of hours. (Iguanas and pythons don’t eat all that often.) There’s none of the stonewalling and cold shoulder that detectives usually encounter in similar books. Also, none of the American characters Frankie encounters display the slightest bit of racism or xenophobia towards Afghans, immigrants, or Sabeera and her family. This is the real world, and plunking sizable numbers of immigrants with little command of English in established communities will cause some friction with locals… but not in Kiss Her Goodbye.

A significant portion of the book comprises entries from a “journal” Sabeera kept since her younger days in Afghanistan. Every few chapters, the author includes an excerpt from the journal that provides explanations to readers about recent events in the book. However, more importantly for me, these entries show what life was like for an educated young woman in Afghanistan before and during the Taliban takeover. This journal also shows how Sabeera and her family left the country and what life was like in the resettlement camps before arriving in the United States. The author conducted extensive research on these subjects, and her efforts are apparent here. The journal was an eye-opener for me and, I’m sure, for many other readers as well. These chapters were far more interesting than Frankie’s attempts to bond with an iguana.

Without the lengthy journal entries, rating Kiss Her Goodbye would have been a close call for me. I liked the mystery itself, although I realize its cryptic clues may not appeal to some. However, the book’s lame humor and Frankie’s overly convenient circumstances and acquaintances grew increasingly annoying as the story went along. The journal entries made the difference. They provided me with a well-researched view of the recent immigrant experience that was completely new to me. I heartily recommend Kiss Her Goodbye as a mystery and an educational source.

NOTE: The publisher graciously provided me with a copy of this book through NetGalley. However, the decision to review the book and the contents of this review are entirely my own.