🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 4.2/5 | Steam: 🔥 | Book 3 in the Frankie Elkin Series
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read Still See You Everywhere yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
A woman on death row. Three weeks until her execution. A sister she hasn’t seen since the girl was five years old. And a message left on a board, reaching out to the one person she thinks might actually find her.
That’s how Frankie Elkin ends up on a remote atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, working as a bartender for a billionaire, trying to locate a seventeen-year-old girl she’s never met. For a serial killer.
This series keeps doing something I genuinely appreciate: every single book puts Frankie somewhere completely different and forces her to figure it out with almost nothing in her corner. Book 1 was the city. Book 2 was the wilderness. Book 3 is a tiny island surrounded by water with no way off, and someone who wants people dead is either already there or on her way.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
The Message from Death Row
Kaylee, known publicly as the Beautiful Butcher and convicted of killing eighteen men, sends Frankie a message through a board. She needs Frankie to find her sister Leia.
Here’s what Kaylee tells her: their mother sent both girls off to Hawaii when they were young. They ended up with a man who took them in and got abusive. The night he really came after Kaylee, she woke up in a hospital and never saw her little sister again. Leia was five years old. She’s seventeen now, and Kaylee has three weeks before her execution date.
A letter arrived at some point from Leia saying she still loved her. So she’s alive. But when Kaylee’s lawyer went looking, all signs of Leia inside McMannis’s compound had been erased.
McMannis is a billionaire who bought himself an atoll in the Hawaiian chain and is developing it into something. The crew is small. And Kaylee, along with her lawyer, has already arranged a job for Frankie before Frankie has even agreed to go. Frankie notices this. She’s a little impressed and a little unsettled. She goes anyway. The goal is simple: get eyes on Leia.
Arriving on the Atoll
The previous worker left suddenly after breaking her ankle. Except Vaughn, the man running operations on the island, eventually tells Frankie the truth: the stairs to that woman’s cabin had been deliberately loosened. She didn’t just fall.
Frankie starts learning the lay of the land, meeting the crew, and clocking immediately that something is off. Rumors are floating around about a sunken sub, hidden treasure, things suggesting this atoll has history nobody is discussing.
Then Vaughn takes her out to a location and asks what she sees. She spots stones that are too straight to be natural. They move them. There’s a body underneath.
The Characters You Can’t Quite Read
Charlie is supposedly Australian. Except his accent comes and goes, and Frankie notices immediately. He photographs her and Vaughn when they find the body, has endless questions for her, and answers none of hers. She doesn’t trust him from the start.
Vaughn calls Frankie into his office and lays it out: no passport, connected to cold cases where people were found or bodies were recovered. She makes him a deal. She answers his questions, he answers hers. He confirms the broken ankle was sabotage. He also tells her about a string of other things going wrong: cracked cistern, electrical problems, comms equipment tampered with. Someone is actively working against this island.
Then one night Charlie goes missing. They find him with a heavy branch on top of him, badly hurt. He comes to long enough to tell Frankie one thing: don’t let them take me off this island before she gets here. She is the key. His Australian accent disappears completely.
Mac and Leia Arrive
Mac comes to the atoll with a security team and Leia at his side. The energy shifts the moment they land. It’s implied that when Leia turns eighteen, which is soon, Mac plans to sleep with her. Frankie is deeply uncomfortable.
She manages to get a moment alone with Leia, says something Kaylee told her, something specific about a cat, and Leia’s whole face changes. They talk.
Leia tells her that Kaylee escaped from prison. She beat her lawyer half to death, stole her clothes, and got out with a security guard’s help. She is somewhere out there. And she is not coming to save anyone. Leia doesn’t associate Kaylee with family or love. She associates her with blood and violence.
A small sub, coffin-sized, built for one person, washes up on the atoll’s shore. Frankie starts piecing it together. This island doesn’t work well as a trafficking entry point, but as an exit point for human trafficking out of Hawaii, men for labor and women for worse, it’s ideal. This is not just a passion project.
The Bigger Picture
Frankie and Vaughn make an announcement to the group about what’s going on. More sabotage surfaces. And then Frankie realizes something: Leia helped arrange Kaylee’s escape. If Leia is part of this, Kaylee’s destination is this atoll. She might already be here.
Charlie finally drops all pretense. He’s FBI. He was on his way to the burial mound when the branch came down on him. The first FBI agent sent to this atoll nine months earlier, a woman, disappeared without a trace.
The full plan starts clicking into place. McMannis’s original business partner had taken money from very bad people, cartel-level. When the partner tried to get out, they killed him, though everyone assumed Mac did it. Mac kept taking the money. Now those people want it back, and they’ve gotten to Leia as leverage. The plan: Kaylee would get onto the island and torture Mac until he handed over account information. Leia turns eighteen soon and stands to receive a significant trust from Mac, but only if she can’t be seen as involved in killing him. So Kaylee does the dirty work. Then Leia and Brent, the copilot who has been in on this the whole time, disappear together with the money.
Brent was the one doing all the sabotage. Not to cause harm. To get people off the island before Kaylee arrived to kill Mac. He was trying to reduce casualties. Charlie kept fixing everything, which ruined Brent’s plan at every turn.
Kaylee on the Island
They’re trying to get everyone onto the plane and out. Merrily is the pilot. As she’s boarding, Brent walks up, says sorry, and shoots her up close, in a way that didn’t kill her. He could have. He chose not to.
Chaos breaks out. And while everyone is running, Frankie sees Kaylee standing at the edge of the tree line, smiling at her. She’s already on the island.
Brent corners Frankie and tells her to give him one good reason not to kill her. She talks her way through it and gets the full picture: Leia told Brent that after Mac was dead, he could kill Kaylee. She told Kaylee that after Mac was dead, she could kill Brent. She was playing both of them the entire time. The real plan was to use Kaylee to get the account information, collect the trust, let Brent dispose of Kaylee, and then Leia and Brent would vanish.
Meanwhile, Kaylee has Mac. Frankie and Vaughn end up standing outside a cabin, listening to Mac being tortured. They don’t know how to get off the island. They don’t know what to do.
The Ending
Frankie manages to get hold of a sat phone and runs. Kaylee comes after her. Frankie finds a spot where she can’t be seen or heard and goes still. Kaylee chases and falls, twisting her ankle badly.
A few minutes later, Leia appears behind Kaylee.
What follows is the real unraveling. Leia tells Kaylee what she actually planned: she told Brent he could kill Kaylee when this was over, and she told Kaylee she could kill Brent. She was always going to let Brent take care of Kaylee, because Leia has known since she was five years old what Kaylee is capable of.
The night their mother told them to run to family, Leia waited at the end of the driveway. Kaylee went back into the house and said she forgot something. What she went back for was to strangle their mother. Leia didn’t stay at the driveway. She followed. She watched it happen.
Kaylee listens. And then she tells Leia something.
There is a fourteen-year age difference between them. Kaylee’s father raped her. He was Kaylee’s father and Leia’s grandfather both. Kaylee is not Leia’s sister.
Kaylee is Leia’s mother.
They have a strange, broken heart-to-heart. And then Leia shoots Kaylee. And then she shoots herself.
Murder-suicide. Everyone on the island is safe because of it. In the end, Leia saved everybody, which is the strangest way this could have resolved for a girl who had been running a scheme this calculated from the very beginning.
The Twist We Didn’t See Coming
Kaylee being Leia’s mother. The fourteen-year age difference, the father who was also the grandfather, the whole horrible chain of it lands like a weight. It reframes everything Kaylee ever did. Eighteen kills, all men. You have to wonder about the man who started all of it.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥 / 5 — Zero steam. Pure thriller. Content notes: violence, torture, human trafficking themes, murder-suicide, abuse backstory, predatory adult-minor dynamics.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
It’s a strange kind of satisfied. Leia pulling that trigger is a weird ending for a character who insisted she felt nothing, that killing was just efficient. You’re left wondering if she felt something in that last moment, or if she was just making the most logical move available. Either way, I’m still thinking about it.
Would I Reread It?
Yes. Knowing from page one that Leia is the real architect of everything would make every single interaction read completely differently. She is very good at playing the shy, scared girl. She had everyone fooled.
Who Is This For
If you’re already in the Frankie Elkin series, you’re reading this, that’s just the truth. If you’re new, start with Book 1. The setup matters. But if you want a thriller that drops its protagonist into a completely different environment every time and finds new ways to make you feel trapped right along with her, this series is delivering.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Bookshop.org
🎧 Audiobook
Audible US | Audible CA | Libro.fm
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📚 More from the Frankie Elkin Series
- Book 1 — Before She Disappeared | Reviewed by LD | ⭐ 4.3/5 | Steam: 🔥
- Book 2 — One Step Too Far | Reviewed by LD | ⭐ 4.6/5 | Steam: 🔥
- Book 3 — Still See You Everywhere | Reviewed by LD | ⭐ 4.2/5 | Steam: 🔥
- Book 4 — Kiss Her Goodbye | Reviewed by LD | ⭐ 3.4/5 | Steam: 🔥 — You’re here!
- Full Series Review — Is the Frankie Elkins Series Worth Reading? — 4 ⭐
Ready for more from LD? Find them here
Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Series: Frankie Elkin Book 3 | Genre: Thriller / Mystery | Steam: 🔥