Non-stop action in a mother’s nightmare
Aquick visit to Kmart goes horribly wrong for solo mother Jamie Brandt when her two daughters disappear from the carpark.
Two Girls Down is a somewhat flippant title for a book about an unimaginably terrifying situation but the search for the missing sisters is told at a fast clip of runon sentences and action that just doesn’t stop. In the opening pages we meet Brandt and her daughters, Kylie, 10, and Baylie, 8, and their step-above hard-scrabble life is quickly outlined, as is the panic to get to the ill-fated birthday party with girls properly dressed and present properly wrapped.
After the girls disappear, we meet private detective Alice Vega, called in by Jamie’s Aunt Maggie, who joins forces with former cop Max Caplan. Vega’s plea for help catapults him out of his new life as a divorced private eye (after public disgrace cost him his career) and back to the rhythms and adrenalin-fuelled lifestyle of a working detective.
Most of the characters throughout Luna’s novel are a little too cliched for my taste: the disgraced cop was, of course, innocent of wrongdoing; tragic Brandt is the flawed and struggling but devoted mother; Vega is the troubled but feisty and independent woman of so many novels of this ilk.
We meet an assorted cast of drug dealers, bartenders and parents of friends of the girls as the search gets more and more desperate. But the story is just as much about Vega, Cap and their developing relationship than the search for the missing girls. They are cut out
from the official police operation (the local police are, of course, largely incompetent and overly territorial) so use limited resources and their own ingenuity to find and follow leads. Much is made of the relationship between Vega and Cap but, pleasingly, it avoids falling into stereotypical horizontal bonding.
Luna is best known as a Young Adult author and I think that shows in the depth of plotting and writing in Two Girls Down. But she keeps the pace going and the shockingly believable conclusion is satisfying. She has left the door open for the return of Vega and Cap — and I hope to see them again soon.