Tag: mystery

In The Woods (Dublin Murder Squad #1)

I have been enjoying mystery/thrillers lately and In The Woods by Tana French kept popping up on the lists of best police procedural mysteries so I placed that hold at the library.

The buddy cops Rob and Cassie are super adorable and I loved them immediately. Watching their banter and interactions made me laugh out loud more than once, and it was refreshing to see a true male/female friendship in a book that had no romantic undertones at all. It was more like a sister/brother dynamic if I had to compare it to anything at all, but really they were best friends and good partners.

Aaaand that’s where what I liked about this book ends. It wasn’t enough to keep me reading to the end, which disappointed me because I was hoping to get into this series. Everything took forever to do, almost half the book was just walking around a small Irish town talking to people and it was boooorrrrrriiiiiiing. When I got close to halfway and I realized I didn’t care about the story or what was happening, liking the two main characters wasn’t going to be enough to make me keep reading about the boring things they were doing. This was a did not finish and I was glad to put it down.

I think that Louisa Luna has ruined me for all other police procedurals, so I’ll take the next Alice Vega novel now, thanks. 🙂 But Into the Woods should be skipped. Go read Two Girls Down or The Janes instead if you haven’t yet.

The Janes (Alice Vega #2)

Two Girls Down (Alice Vega #1)

Alex Vega and Max Caplan are back for this Southwest human trafficking adventure! Two Jane Does are discovered in southern California, and the police department there hires Alex Caplan to investigate because they want to keep it off the radar to assist the DEA in their ongoing drug trafficking investigation. She of course calls in her partner Max Caplan, who is so lovesick agrees immediately even though his most recent job just offered him salary and benefits to come on as a full time investigator at their law firm.

This book starts a LOT faster than Two Girls Down and I was very thankful for that. Luna is a talented storyteller and for these kinds of thrillers I just needed her to get straight to the action. Corrupt cops and drug kingpins and human trafficking of children for sex dungeons – there is a lot going on here. And if you think you know where it’s going, you don’t. It’s what makes this book so fucking amazing.

I have to admit that at the start the way Caplan fawns over Vega, even creepily looking in on her through the blinds of her hotel room, kind of hit me the wrong way. It didn’t seem endearing, it felt like it was kind of dancing on the line between lovesick and obsessed and it made me uncomfortable. He’s got some boundaries though, and never acts on anything, so that’s something. I just feel like the way he was written early on kind of soured my view of how cool he was from the first book.

Eventually that resolves so it isn’t a major focus and we’re off to the races. This book has so many layers and every time I peeled one back I was shocked (and a little terrified) to find the next one. I devoured this book, I didn’t want to stop reading. It’s the first book I’ve taken in to read before bed in a long time because I had to squeeze just one more chapter in before I fell asleep.

You don’t have to read Two Girls Down before this one, but if you want to feel invested in the character development between Vega and Cap and Nell and the Bastard, you’ll want to read it first. You won’t mind though, they are both spectacular. Go get you some.