Hideout by Louisa Luna

Louisa Luna is the author of three books with Alice Vega as the protagonist, an investigator who specializes in finding missing persons. The complimentary character is Max Caplan. The first book in the series was reviewed by ECD in 2017, and his comments were favorable. I was presented with this prepublication novel. I thought the opening of this third book, Hideout, was fun. Zeb Williams was the place kicker for the football team at Berkeley in the early 1980’s. At The Big Game against Stanford in his senior year, he made a bizarre choice. The game was tied and rather than kick the ball for the game winning field goal in the last seconds, he grabbed the ball from his older, ran the length of the field scoring a touchdown for Stanford, and then he kept running through the stadium, to the parking lot, and he was never heard from again. The event was famous, and lots of effort failed to find him.

 

30 years later, Vega was hired to find him. There were some interesting characters in the small town where most of the action took place, but that’s really the last positive comment I have to make. I could not identify with any of the characters who mostly I did not find believable. I thought the concluding section of the book was bizarre, out of the blue, and disappointing. This book does not get my recommendation. 

Two Girls Down

I got the chance to read a prepublication thriller from Simon & Schuster, Two Girls Down, by Louisa Luna. Jamie Brandt was a single mother who understandably struggled to deal with the responsibilities for her two girls, 10-year-old Kylie and 8-year-old Bailey. The girls’ father just took off when Jamie was born and he had not been seen or heard from in years. On the way to a birthday party for Kylie’s friend, they stopped at a Kmart. The girls stayed in the car while Jamie ran in to buy a gift which she could barely afford. Despite having been under strict orders not to leave the car, by the time Jamie returned, the girls had disappeared. Very quickly it was determined that they had been kidnapped.

Luna brought a great cast of characters to this story. Alice Vega was the protagonist who specialized in finding missing children, and she was very good at it. Arriving from her home in California, Vega needed some local assistance, and she turned to recently disgraced and voluntarily retired police officer Max “Cap” Caplan, now doing very mundane work as a private investigator. There was more to Cap than his story suggested. He was a divorced father with a precocious 16-year-old daughter, Nell. There were other well-designed individuals in the police department and in the families of all the principal characters, but Vega and Cap were the ones who carried this story.

As Luna developed the characters and set up the plot, the first chapter was a little slow, but by midway through chapter two, I was hooked. My only frustration was that my own life kept interrupting me from reading it all the way through in one sitting – it was that good. The author had twists in the plot that I did not see coming – the resolution was not what I expected. Vega and Cap are the sorts of characters that could carry a long set of novels. I hope to see more from Ms. Luna. The novel is scheduled to be released after the first of the year, so get this one reserved right now.