Endorsed by Stephen King and our reviewer, ‘The Return of Ellie Black’ is an ‘assured’ thriller

Missing persons are almost inescapable in thrillers, and for good reason. Not knowing what has happened to someone, imagining what could have happened, is compelling reading. That’s exactly what you’ll find in Emiko Jean’s “The Return of Ellie Black.”

This is Jean’s first foray into suspense. She made the leap (not as big as you might think for this versatile author) from YA novels — “Tokyo Ever After” and a sequel, “Tokyo Dreaming,” about a teenager who discovers she’s part of Japan’s imperial family — by way of “Mika in Real Life,” the tale of a woman found by the daughter she put up for adoption.

A throughline is immediately obvious, one that helps distinguish “Ellie Black” from other thrillers: Japanese heritage and adoption. Chelsey Calhoun, a police detective, is Japanese but grew up as one of two daughters — the other biological — in a white family. Her past as an adoptee is just one of many traumas that shape her life: Chelsey has had to contend with her mother skipping out on her adoptive family; her parents’ resulting divorce; her father, a onetime police chief, dying of cancer; and, most especially, the years-ago death of her teenage sister.

So when a miracle happens and Ellie Black is found in the woods two years after going missing, a case Chelsey has worked from the beginning and obsesses over for reasons having to do with her sister, there is cause for celebration. But something is wrong. Ellie, despite showing signs of abuse, is unwilling to talk about what happened to her. Why?

Her story and Chelsey’s are told in alternating chapters that include a handful from the perspectives of Ellie’s family members, boyfriend and therapist. Ellie’s chapters are in first person and the others in third, an effective stylistic choice whose purpose doesn’t become clear until near the end.

The early Chelsey chapters, however, are sometimes burdened by too much musing as a way of providing background: She “blinks away the memory” as she thinks about how she met her husband, for instance. Or, as she drives, Chelsey can “allow herself to sink now. To let go. To be lost in memory,” in order to provide the details of Ellie’s disappearance.

The narrative quickens once the need to backfill diminishes. It twists, turns and deepens as Jean uses the thriller as a vehicle to reflect on the state of women and how they are treated in the workplace, by the people who say they love them and by men: “Chelsey knows that violent men are not inevitable. They are not a matter of course. Of nature. Of being born. Violent men are forged.”

“Ellie Black” is a decidedly assured debut in the genre. Hopefully, it’s just the beginning for Emiko Jean.

The Return of Ellie Black

By: Emiko Jean.

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $28.99.