Ask for Me Tomorrow was published by Random House in 1976. Gilly Decker, a wealthy woman confined to a wheelchair, lives in Baja California with her second husband. She asks the young lawyer Tom Aragon to find her first husband, B.J. Lockwood, who vanished into Mexico years ago. Gilly claims to want a divorce so she can leave her estate cleanly, but her motivations are more complex than she admits.
Aragon’s investigation takes him through the border towns and expatriate communities of Baja — a world of Americans in voluntary exile, Mexicans navigating between two cultures, and people who have deliberately severed connections with their previous lives. The search for Lockwood becomes a search through layers of identity: people who have changed their names, their stories, their faces. In Millar’s border world, disappearance is not an event but a process — a gradual dissolution of the self into anonymity.
The novel is among Millar’s most purely atmospheric: the Baja California setting is rendered with precise, sun-bleached detail, and the mood of displacement and exile permeates every scene. Tom Aragon, who would appear in subsequent novels, is a more conventional detective figure than Millar usually employs — but his ordinariness provides a stable point from which to observe a world of extraordinary deception.
Collecting Ask for Me Tomorrow
First edition (Random House, New York, 1976): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $40–$100
- Very good: $15–$40