Review: Two Girls Down by Louisa Luna

Synopsis:

When two young sisters disappear from a strip mall parking lot in a small Pennsylvania town, their devastated mother hires an enigmatic bounty hunter, Alice Vega, to help find the girls. Immediately shut out by a local police department already stretched thin by budget cuts and the growing OxyContin and meth epidemic, Vega enlists the help of a disgraced former cop, Max Caplan. Cap is a man trying to put the scandal of his past behind him and move on, but Vega needs his help to find the girls, and she will not be denied.

With little to go on, Vega and Cap will go to extraordinary lengths to untangle a dangerous web of lies, false leads, and complex relationships to find the girls before time runs out, and they are gone forever.

My Thoughts:

Two Girls Down by Louisa Luna was my Book of the Month read from January 2018 that I am just getting around to. This book was kind of slow to start even though the girls go missing in the first ten pages. After they go missing though, it was a slow build to the actual meat of the story. I pushed through it and I am glad that I did. This book turned out to be a great thriller and kept me guessing.

Jamie Brandt, mother of Kylie and Bailey, leaves her two young daughters in the car alone in a Kmart parking lot. I know it’s a small town, but come on. The two girls get kidnapped and that is when we start the slow crawl towards the action.

Enter Alice Vega. She is a bounty hunter that finds missing persons and she is amazing at what she does. Jamie’s family hires her to find Kylie and Bailey and to also figure out why anyone would kidnap their babies. She has found about 18 missing people and only a small number of them have been dead, so the family had pretty high hopes for Alice Vega. Vega knew she would need some help though. I’m glad honestly that the police department would not help her at first because she was able to convince Max to help her instead.

Alice Vega and Max Caplan are a great team and definitely know what they’re doing. I do believe there were times when they should have called for backup, but in the beginning the police department was not even helping them. With Alice’s keen eye and Max’s previous experience as a police officer they definitely had a way of getting the answers that they needed and wanted, which ultimately helped them find the missing Brandt girls. I enjoy their banter and the way they finally start to trust each other.

Luna definitely did a great job at making everyone, even family members, look suspicious. Questions would arise with every person that they visited, but eventually the layers of this mystery started to unfold. The ending was not exactly what I was expecting. I became attached to Vega and Cap being together. Luna did a great job at character development for those two. Overall, I would recommend this book if you enjoy mysteries that mostly focus around the private investigators.