Two Girls Down

Author: Louisa Luna
Genre: Suspense
Type: Hardcover
Pages: 304
Series: #1 in the Alice Vega series
Source: Local Public Library
Publisher: Doubleday Books
First Published: January 9, 2018
Opening Lines: Jamie Brandt was not a bad mother. Later she would tell that to anyone who would listen: police, reporters, lawyers, her parents, her boyfriend, her dealer, the new bartender with the knuckle tattoos at Schultz's, the investigator from California and her partner, and her own reflection in the bathroom mirror, right before cracking her forehead on the sink's edge and passing out from the cocktail of pain, grief and fear.

Book Description from GoodReads: 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 Rating: 2.5 stars

My Review: Two Girls Down introduces readers to Alice Vega - a bounty hunter with a strong track record for finding missing children. In this first book of a new series, Vega teams up with Max Caplan, a disgraced former-cop-turned-PI who lives in the small town where two young sisters go missing. 

Vega is a hard-as-nails character, but she soon veered from tough and kick-ass to a robotic caricature as her volatile behaviours took centre stage. There's a sweet spot for a strong, female character (Esperanza Diaz from Harlan Coben's Myron Bolitar series comes to mind) but Vega's character fell outside of that for me.

Max Caplan had his own personal issues but was a likeable guy with a great relationship with his teenage daughter. But I needed a better explanation of why he threw his police career away (the reason given was frustratingly weak). But it was his occasional sexual thoughts that would come out at odd times that threw me. They felt out of character, creepy and remained unexplained to the reader.

This book started off strong but there wasn't enough tension or urgency to find these girls. It's a police procedural that gets too stuck in the procedures. Too much time is spent on unnecessary dialogue, Max and Vega running around interviewing numerous secondary characters that start to blend together and, don't forget, the sad, totally awkward and unnecessary attempt at a romance. 

While Two Girls Down had a good premise, the characters need work and the overly convoluted plot needed to be pared down to avoid the plot fizzling out half way through and never quite recovering.