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.