I began to do a little digging on elephants, and when I discovered that they actually grieve and experience and process loss, I was completely hooked, and knew I would be writing about what it meant to be left behind…and also that I had my profession for the character of Alice. As I said with the prequel, I LOVE elephants and I found all the information given about these magnificent creatures fascinating. Despite the challenge these elements of the story brought, Picoult weaves them in to the main plot with finesse and skill.

I loved the characters, and the usual way of each character having alternate chapters, was brilliant.

Together they revisit the site of the defunct elephant sanctuary and inexplicably find new evidence about the case. The book contains a lot of information about elephants: how they live, what they eat, how they behave, how they play, how they grieve for deceased loved ones, and so on. It was so interesting and even as Jenna is remembering being killed I am like, "Oh she was kidnapped. She was the one who decided where the group went every day, when they took a rest, where they ate and where they drank.

I now want to go back and read it again, to spot the clues, as I'm sure they were littered throughout, and will now be more obvious, having read the book once. After reading some 380 (approx, give or take 20) pages we find out that Alice is alive, but that Jenna, the drunk former detective, Gideon (the guy her mum had an affair with), and a whole host of other characters we were introduced to are in fact DEAD. We are first introduced to the three female narrators, each in her own voice: 13 year old Jenna; her mother Alice, who ten years ago checked herself out of a hospital never to be seen again; and the down-on-her-luck psychic, Serenity, who Jenna hires to help find Alice. The point of zoos was to develop breeding programs and more importantly to encourage conservation of animals that might not be indigenous to a country. Desperate for answers, Jenna uses all her savings to recruit the aid of a private detective - and a psychic.

The term given to the way members of elephant herds take care of each other’s offspring is ‘allomothering’.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. This makes Virgil believe that Thomas acted out because there was suspicion that Alice had been having an affair with another worker at the elephant sanctuary, Gideon. Her grandmother is quiet about the whole affair and her father has been confined to a psychiatric hospital since the incident took place. I have no idea if I would reread this book ever again in my life but I am happy that I finally found the time to read another book from Jodi Picoult.This is another story (credit to author Jodi Picoult), that came vibrantly alive through 'all' the voices of the readers. An intelligent young girl, she’s save up some money and begins to do her own amateur detective work, gathers clues along with other bits and pieces and, under the pretext of doing babysitting jobs, sets out to enlist the help of Serenity Jones and Virgil Stanhope, in the hopes that, together, they will be able to find Alice. As a reader I try to out-think authors and work out how a story will end, which is what I tried to do with this book. If you are concerned about elephants, donate time and money to an accredited anti-poaching organization. Along with just a handful of other overseas authors, Jodi Picoult is one of my favourites and has been ever since I discovered her in the early 1990s.