Before She Disappeared displays many characteristics of the hard-boiled detective story. The hard-boiled story is gritty and cynical with a focus on realism. It draws a clear line between right and wrong, good and evil. Both antagonists and victims are uncomplicated. Villains have no redeeming qualities or motives. Victims, although sometimes suspect at the outset, are revealed by the end to be virtuous. By contrast, other subgenres like the noir detective thriller treat the world as fallen; good and evil are ambiguous. In that variant of detective genre, the line between villains and victims may be unclear.

The protagonists in the hard-boiled detective genre are typically depicted as outwardly stoic loners with a limited range of emotional expression. Traditionally men, they operate in a violent environment and employ physical or verbal violence to solve problems. The implication is that society sometimes has to create monsters (extreme characters) to fight society’s monsters. Unlike the genre’s villains and victims, whose morality is clear, the protagonist is often an antihero who exists in a morally gray area.

Frankie is in many ways a typical hard-boiled detective. She tends to be a cynical loner/outsider with a well-concealed heart of gold that compels her to see justice done.