A chance encounter with Tucsonans Dana Narter and Ed Baruch inspired bestselling author Lisa Gardner’s latest book, “Kiss Her Goodbye,” which is set mainly in Tucson.
Gardner met the couple in 2023 on a whale-watching trip in California. They told her about serving as companions to a family of Afghan refugees who had been resettled by Jewish Family & Children’s Services of Southern Arizona. As JFCS volunteers, the couple also resettled refugees from Afghanistan and several countries in Africa. (See more here.)
The author was overwhelmed both by the enormity of what refugees must leave behind, “your country, your job, your identity, your extended family, which is how lots of people in the world define family,” she says, and by the isolation they face when newly arrived.
She knew immediately that a missing Afghan refugee would make a perfect case for her Frankie Elkin series. Frankie, an amateur sleuth with a checkered past, searches for missing people when the authorities have given up.
In “Kiss Her Goodbye,” the missing person is recent refugee Sabera Ahmadi, a young wife and mother haunted by memories of the 2021 fall of Kabul. It’s been three weeks since Sabera failed to return home after her cleaning shift at a Tucson resort, and her friend Aliah is adamant that Sabera would never abandon her 4-year-old daughter.
Aliah calls in Frankie when the police and even Sabera’s husband, Isaad, don’t seem overly concerned by her disappearance.
Many of the characters are composites of people Gardner met through Narter and Baruch during her research trips to Tucson. One of these was Shamsadin Zamani, who had been a lawyer in Afghanistan and “spoke candidly of having to rebuild a life for his family in a new country that doesn’t recognize his education or expertise,” Gardner says.
“Afghan hospitality is the stuff of legend, and Shams is no exception,” she writes in the acknowledgments to “Kiss Her Goodbye.”
“He not only invited me into his home to meet his family but personally prepared a feast of authentic dishes to share,” she says, counting that afternoon as one she’ll never forget.
Other characters, Gardner says, come purely from her imagination, such as Bart, the gamer/software millionaire who lets Frankie stay at his Foothills estate as long as she cares for his pet iguana, Petunia, and a bevy of snakes — a deal Frankie’s not at all sure she wants to make. Then there’s Genni, Bart’s cross-dressing cook, and Daryl, his driver, an ex-con with a penchant for ballroom dancing.
“Writing for me is a discovery process,” says Gardner, who first pictured Daryl as a boxer before realizing that would be “too trite.” Searching for an alternative pastime, she hit upon ballroom dancing and thought, “Oh my God, that’s so perfect for him.”
Narter was fascinated by the amount of research Gardner does for her novels.
She recognizes aspects of herself, refugees, and volunteers and staff members involved in refugee resettlement in some of the characters.
Gardner did an excellent job of conveying what day-to-day life is like for refugees, Narter says, and the work resettlement agencies handle, often on short notice, such as finding, cleaning, and furnishing apartments that refugees can afford.
Gardner also sets pivotal scenes in Kabul and a refugee camp where Sabera, an educated woman from an affluent family, surprises herself by volunteering in the medical tent. These vivid scenes, Gardner says, would not have been possible without refugees “courageously sharing their (often harrowing) experiences with me.”
The author also met with representatives of No One Left Behind, a nonprofit founded by an Afghan refugee that works to evacuate and resettle interpreters and other U.S.-government employees eligible for the Iraqi and Afghan Special Immigrant Visa programs.
Their fictional counterparts play a role in “Kiss Her Goodbye” as Gardner slowly unveils the mystery, and the tension and danger mount.
“Being a fiction writer, I have dramatized many details,” Gardner writes in the book’s acknowledgements. “But so many of the issues encountered by Sabera and her family in this novel are sadly quite real.”
