Written by contributor Verushka Byrow
Two Girls Down was a black hole of intensity, but in a good way, trust me. It’s one of those reads that sucked me into the story and kept the world at bay.
When Kylie and Bailey are kidnapped from a mall, their family calls in Alice Vega, an accomplished PI in the art of finding missing children. Alice is all coiled energy, walking into the city and asserting herself quietly and effectively to the cops who don’t have enough men to cover this kidnapping like they should. Alice has been doing this long enough to know how to play the outsider card, knowing exactly what she’s going to find at the police station and with the family.
As the book progresses, Luna begins to let us in to her past, to the cases she doesn’t talk about, but you quickly realise just how deeply they’ve marked her. She is relentless, efficient and you know she won’t give up, no matter what.
And all of that is what attracts Cap to her.
Luna has mastered the art of the quiet simmer, showing these two people click in a way they haven’t experienced with anyone else. I mean, a single, divorced ex-cop PI with a teen daughter he adores and a PI/bounty hunter. But they do, and it’s one of those things that is unexplainable, and has them working like partners as if they had known each other for years.
Cap is a devoted father, a good guy who helped out a friend on the force and got fired as a result. He knew what could happen, but he did it any way when he covered for Em, a fellow cop, but he did it anyway. Now, as a PI he’s finishing up divorce cases when Vega uses him to get information from the department. And Cap kind of admires her for it.
Theirs is a quiet simmer, the kind that’s always in the background, and in Cap’s thoughts, even if it may … slightly confuse Alice that she reacts to him, or wants him as she does. I don’t think she quite believes she’s allowed something outside her work. Or that she’s allowed someone like Cap, and part of that is in a past she can’t quite bring herself to talk about. I can’t quite place my finger on it, but I think it surprised them both.
The case is one of those ones that consumes them. Together they navigate the good and bad leads, the cops and the FBI as the case gets bigger, much more so than they expected. I expected some of the ending, but Luna created the kind of villains that make your skin crawl because they truly believe they are doing the right thing, and they should be thanked for it.
Given this is the Alice Vega series, I didn’t expect to play as large a part in this, and seeing that book 2 is out, in that one too. I thought he would be someone she’d work with here and move on, and I wonder if the author always planned it this way? No matter, this is a partnership worth following.
Two Girls Down is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.
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Synopsis | 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.
