  | Book Details Title: The Janes: An Alice Vega Novel |
Book DescriptionReview “PI Alice Vega is nothing less than an utterly compelling protagonist in her second case (after Two Girls Down, 2018), which resumes her remarkable partnership with fellow PI Max Caplan. . . A somewhat Shakespearean ending satisfies with triumphant women standing strong on a stage littered with battered villains.” —Booklist, starred review “Luna skillfully balances tragedy and humor throughout, via blood-pressure-raising fight scenes and stressful suspense, plus hints of romantic tension between Vega and Cap. She also offers a fascinating and disturbing look at how a criminal enterprise might work, pulling in various complex threads while crafting a story that’s wholly believable and sad. The Janes is a superbly entertaining read, especially for readers who are already fans of the amazing Vega, whose Jack Reacher-esque sense of justice offers reassurance that, no matter how long it takes, no bad deed will go unpunished.” —BookPage“The Janes has everything—a plot ripped from the headlines and darkly twisted, explosive action, original characters, a dash of humor, and memorable settings. The story grabs the reader like a steel band of cold tension tightening with each new development. Investigators Alice Vega and Max Caplan deserve a long career with many more cases ahead.” —Anne Hillerman, author of the New York Times best-selling Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito mysteries “The Janes is a timely, gripping thriller with an ending that will leave you utterly satisfied but wanting more of Alice Vega. Get to know her now, because she and her partner, Max Caplan, will be around for the long haul.”—Alafair Burke, New York Times bestselling author of The Better Sister“Thrilling. . .[Luna’s] novels have established her as a powerful up-and-coming voice in the genre, and we can’t wait to see what she does next.” —Crime Reads“An intricately plotted, adrenaline-fueled conspiracy thriller. . .Luna’s latest entertains while subverting gender stereotypes and confronting the politics of immigration.” —Kirkus Reviews“Packed with thrills and heartache, The Janes kept me up way past my bedtime to see what rule-bending, jaw-breaking, no-fools-suffering P.I. Alice Vega would do next in her relentless pursuit of justice for the victims of a border sex trafficking ring. An absolutely rip-roaring read from a fantastic talent.”—Amy Gentry, bestselling author of Good as Gone“What starts as a straightforward, if extremely challenging, assignment—figuring out who killed two barely teenage Latina Jane Does and dumped them in the San Diego, Calif., area—quickly turns treacherous for PIs Alice Vega and Max Caplan in Luna’s gripping sequel to 2018’s Two Girls Down. . . Plunging the now-rogue team into a perilous sprint to stay one step ahead. . .as they race to unravel a plot as dark and twisted as one of the tunnels [used] for smuggling between Mexico and the U.S. . .This dynamic duo has a long run.”—Publishers Weekly Read more About the Author Louisa Luna is the author of Two Girls Down (featuring Vega and Cap) as well as Brave New Girl and Crooked. She was born and raised in San Francisco and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter. Read more Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 9780385545518|excerptLuna / LAST COUPLE STANDING1meet our girl: seventeen, arrived here a year ago from a rough and dusty town in Chiapas, considered pretty by most standards because she is young, her face unmarked by scars or wrinkles, her body boasting the tender snap of fresh muscle. Our girl’s brain, on the other hand, is at war with itself and others: with memories of her mother’s worry and her father’s pain, subtle with her own simmering meditations on sex and violence, with fear of all the men that come through the door with their eyes so stark and full of want it’s like they’ve eaten her up before they’ve even selected her from underneath the butcher’s glass.Our girl walks in bare feet, unsure if she is dreaming. Her dreams these days are collisions, collages, bursts of fire and color that all start normally enough—she is playing paper dolls with her sister on the porch under the umbrella with one panel missing, or fluffing up yellow rice in a pot right after it’s done steaming. But then they turn; the dolls become scuttling cockroaches in her hands; the rice bowl fills with blood; her own teeth grow into blades and shred her tongue to streamers.The house is divided, two floors: the ground floor, where she and the other girls sleep on towels side by side in the bedroom they share, and watch TV and wait in the living room; and there’s downstairs full of boxes that pass for rooms—no windows, no air. The working rooms.Then there is the garage, which is separate from the house, but there are no cars inside. There is just a table and some machines and tools. Our girl hasn’t been there yet but this is what she’s heard. Only girls who cry and act stupid are taken there and our girl keeps her head down and does what she’s supposed to do. She doesn’t ask questions and doesn’t make trouble, but she watches everything.She avoids the bosses. Coyote Ben is easy to avoid because he comes and goes, although when he’s around and there’s no work he grabs the hair at the back of her neck and whispers in her ear. He speaks English so she doesn’t really understand everything he says, but she knows he doesn’t expect her to respond. He lets her make the drinks.Fat Mitch is always there, and he’s got the gun on a belt that looks like it’s strangling all the fat on his stomach. He has named the gun, Selena, after a singer, and he is always reminding the girls the gun is there. He’ll say things in Spanish like “Selena got a lot of sleep last night and wants to have some playtime today.” And then there’s Rafa.Rafa is the one who takes the girls to the garage. Fat Mitch tells them Rafa only does what he does because he has to, but our girl doesn’t buy it. She knows Rafa does it because he likes it. It’s not like on a farm when they make the runtiest worker shoot and drown the sick animals to toughen him up. The house may be a farm but Rafa’s no runt—he’s bigger and stronger than Fat Mitch, and our girl has heard he smiles when he does what he does to the girls in the garage. That is what they get when they act stupid.Our girl’s not stupid, and she stays away from the stupid girls: Isabel, Chicago, Good Hair. They cry and try to steal food. Stupid. The girl called Maricel is new, one of the girls from the city, and while it’s usually not a good idea to get to know the new girls, our girl actually likes her and Good Hair both. In another time and place they may have all played card games and shared secrets about boys in their class. Instead they wait to be picked. Which is better than the alternative. If a girl doesn’t get picked from the TV room for a month, she’s out, not taken to the garage—out out, out of the house and dropped somewhere in the desert because she’s not worth the Wonder bread.Our girl has learned a little English here and there from TV. She pays attention to the American news. Police, homicide, catch, release. She watches a news show about a boy who looks her age, and Mexican too, but American. She tries to wrap her mouth around a word the newswoman keeps repeating, which sounds like something about a duck flying up. Duck-ted. Up-duck-ted. The boy talks to the newswoman, points to a picture of a fish tank. Then there is another woman, not the newswoman; 2014 it says in the corner. Her name is at the bottom of the screen. Our girl notices: American first name, Mexican last name. She looks like she is police. Or a lesbian. Or a gangster. She wears black clothes and sunglasses.Back to the boy. Over and over he says the same thing: “She safes me, she safes me.” Our girl watches the boy’s top row of teeth, the way they scrape his bottom lip as he cries. The word is not “safes.” It’s “saved.” “She saved me,” the boy says, again and again.Our girl watches Maricel get up close to the TV. Maricel doesn’t take her eyes off it. The boy on the screen says, “She saved me. Alice Vega, she saved me.” Maricel begins to cry, along with the boy. Our girl watches her and realizes her own hands are shaking.Our girl has a thought out of nowhere: you treat us like dogs; we’re going to act like dogs. A map unfolds in her mind, square by square. She saved me, the boy says. She saved me. Read more Customers Review: Inside the book jacket of “The Janes” a reviewer compares Alice Vega to Jack Reacher and I think they are way off the mark despite author Lee Child’s endorsement posted on the book jacket. Reacher is a hulking 250 pound, 6’ 5” former US Army Major and Military Policeman who wanders the country wearing the clothes on his back and carrying a travel toothbrush who helps the helpless. Alice Vega is a paid female private investigator who has a home, a car, a cell phone, works with a partner, carries a gun (not a toothbrush), and specializes in finding missing persons. Yes, she’s not afraid to get into the rough stuff with bad guys but she is nowhere close to creating the carnage that Reacher does in any of his adventures. For the first half of “The Janes” Ms. Luna gives her readers a fairly straightforward detective procedural. Somewhat unrealistically the San Diego PD and DEA reach out to her to investigate two young ‘Jane Doe’s’ whose bodies have turned up. Vega’s first inclination is to decline the offer but when pressured she agrees for double the money and if she can bring in a partner. The cops agree to her terms and Vega reaches out to the Pennsylvania based ex-cop turned P.I. she worked with in “Two Girls Down”, Max Caplan. Within the turn of a page ‘Cap’ is landing in California and renting a car to meet up with Vega. They start grinding away on the few clues they have and with some help from Mia, the affable medical examiner and the enigmatic hacker ‘the Bastard’ the duo begin to make progress. It soon becomes apparent that the deceased ‘Janes’ are victims of human traffickers exploiting desperate girls for the sex trade. At about the halfway point in the novel, Vega has her Jack Reacher moment when she assaults a rich suspects’ big goon of a body guard with a giant set of bolt cutters she conveniently carries in the trunk of her car. The emotionally detached Vega contemplates the damage her blows could do kind of like Sherlock Holmes does in the Robert Downey Jr. films; “…Vega swung again from the other side and brought the jaws (of the bolt cutter) down just above the knee on the left side, hoping to snap his IT band, a ligament running from the hip to the shin…” Okay, so Luna didn’t research this very well. The IT band isn’t a ligament and wouldn’t likely be ruptured from a blunt force blow. That type of attack would likely fracture the lateral femoral condyle of lateral tibial plateau if struck with enough force. If she was able to induce a sufficient load on the outside of the knee joint and it buckled inwards (valgus stress) she might rupture the medial collateral ligament. Regardless; she beats up this guy in broad daylight in a public space with people all around to witness (and no doubt video) her actions. Not that the creep didn’t have it coming but IRL Alice would be going to jail for awhile. Without giving anything else away the situation escalates from there and Vega doles out some vicious pain and punishment to other dirt bags involved in this gang. Unlike the invulnerable Reacher she takes some lumps herself as does ‘Cap’. My technical complaints aside I really enjoyed “The Janes” and felt it was a strong follow up to “Two Girls Down”. ‘Cap’ is kind of pervy in his oblique interest in Vega but the two have an interesting dynamic that works. If you’re an action junkie then this book might not offer enough excitement to satisfy you; Vega’s unprosecuted assault and battery aside the actual investigating and the tedium involved felt pretty authentic to me. She and ‘Cap’ do catch enough breaks to keep things moving along though culminating in an exciting conclusion. Some may question whether Mia the M.E. and SDPD Detective McT would risk their careers helping Vega when they hardly know her but given the situation it’s not a huge leap to make. I think that Louisa Luna has a winner on her hands and I’m looking forward to reading the next Alice Vega/Max Caplan story. | |
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