Alice Vega was trained to hunt down those who skip. They skip out on their bail. They skip out on their debts. They change their names and move away and start over somewhere new. But she finds them and returns them to the person who was looking for them, to the person who is paying her for her services. But it turns out that the skills she developed to find and retrieve those who skip out on their responsibilities can be used in another way. They can be used to find missing children.
So when Jamie Brandt’s two girls go missing from the Kmart parking lot in Denville, Pennsylvania, Jamie’s aunt hires Vega to find them and bring them back home. And Vega is a woman on a mission to do just that.
She joins forces with local private investigator Max “Cap” Caplan, a disgraced local cop who knows the area and its people, and whose easy smile and charm help him get answers without Vega having to use her (often violent) tactics. Along with her master hacker, known only as “The Bastard,” Vega and Cap go into the dangerous and distasteful underbelly of Denville to try to track down those two innocent girls.
After fighting with local law enforcement and some lowlife drug dealers, Vega and Cap find themselves closer to the Brandt girls. And also closer to danger. As the hours tick by, will they finally find the thread they need to find the girls before something happens to them, will they be too late, or will they simply get killed in the process?
Louisa Luna has written a tight, taut thriller that keeps you guessing until the end. Two Girls Down is not an easy book to read, as the topic is as painful as they come. But I have to say that I fell madly in love with Alice Vega and wanted this story to end well but the series to go on and on. While she is no Kinsey Milhone, she does scratch the itch that Sue Grafton created in me about 20 pages in to A is for Alibi. I see Vega as a strange amalgamation of Kinsey and Jack Reacher, and I can’t wait to read more of her adventures in the (hopefully near) future.
I listened to the audiobook on this one, and narrator Tavia Gilbert really brought this story to life. I thought she was the perfect voice for Vega, and I just wanted to keep listening to her tell me this story. I had a very hard time walking away from this story, as the tension was real, and I was hooked in deep.
But as I said, it’s not an easy book to read (or listen to). This is a painful, difficult subject, what happens to children when they go missing. And there are some particularly abhorrent characters in this story. But there are also some really lovely characters, like Cap’s teenage daughter Nell, who is truly surprising in every way. If you can stomach the crime, then give Two Girls Down a shot. And maybe you’ll find yourself falling for Alice Vega too.
Galleys for Two Girls Down were provided by Doubleday Books through NetGalley, with many thanks, but I bought the audio book myself, through Audible.