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.