This is the first Vega book I've read, and I liked hte character overall. The book moved along pretty quickly and held my interest, but there were some things that seemed not to totally make sense. But they weren't huge things and the rest of the story was good enough to overlook them.

I absolutely love the Alex Vega series and this book was a wonderful addition! Was it as great as the previous two installments? Maybe not. Would I recommend to a friend? Definitely! It drug just a bit in the beginning for me, but it really picked up and I couldn’t put it down. I can’t wait for more!

Hands down, Alice Vega is my favorite detective. I got so wrapped up in this third book in the series that at one point I said to myself, "I have to tell my husband to get Alice Vega if I ever go missing," before remembering that she is actually a fictional character. But reading these books by Louisa Luna will make you feel like you know her -- or want to be her, or want her to save you. Vega is the definition of a bad ass, and watching her find missing people and work miracles when it comes to investigating is just so much fun. You'll love the relationship between her and her sometimes partner Caplan, the crazy turns the story can often veer off on, and solid mysteries you can't wait to solve.

I think this third book, HIDEOUT, might actually be my favorite of the three. It has a crazy mystery, and goes in completely unexpected places. I love knowing what you expect from an Alice Vega book now, it's comforting even while you're turning the pages like crazy. I still can't wait for the film versions of these books. Fair warning though, these books are not always 100% comfortable. For instance, this book has Vega finding herself in a small Oregon town with a white nationalist problem hiding underneath the surface. Good always wins out in the end though, and along with a love story worming its way through the center of the series, it just makes me want more Lousia Luna on my shelves.

Alice Vega is one of my favorite female fictional characters. She’s a bada$$ and I love her. I especially loved her and Max working together. So I was really surprised to read the majority of the book and she is working solo.

This latest installment seemed to have too many story lines it was trying to work through. First Alice is on assignment to find a football player who has been missing for thirty years. Then she runs into a local hate group. It doesn’t weave together. The pacing is off. She and Max work better together. It took until 90% of the way through the book before they started working together.

I haven’t given up on Alice. I’m counting on more for this character. This one sadly didn’t grip me like the first two installments. The ending was anticlimactic and I know Alice (and the author) can deliver more.

Third book in the series and it was good but not great. Mostly because there was barely any interaction between Vega and Cap in person and that’s half the draw in this series. The white nationalist angle was interesting but it felt like it strayed away from finding Zeb for a long time and the connection took a long time to be brought up. The ending was a bit unique and unexpected, which I liked.

I love the Alice Vega series! In this one, a missing persons case reveals a community of white supremacists. Alice takes a ton of risks (as usual) and this book has my heart pumping. I can’t wait for the next installment. I personally suggest reading these in order.

Ok addition to the series. Not as good as I was hoping, but not bad.

This is the third book featuring Alice Vega. She's a private investigator who is known for finding missing people. She connects with former police detective Max Caplan. In the first book Two Girls Down, she is searching for two missing sisters. In the second book, The Janes, she is tasked to figure out the identities of two dead Jane Does. I loved the interplay between her and Cap in those books and the romantic tension was great as well.

In this installment of the series, Alice is hired to find a man who disappeared in 1984, so this time it's a cold case and there's no real sense of urgency. While I liked the investigation into what happened to that man, what I didn't like was the long, long drawn out foray into white supremacy/white supremacist groups in a small Oregon town that ended up peripherally tying into the case, but not really. The book had a LOT of stalking and fighting and intimidation and it got very old. I kept wondering when we would get back to the main investigation.

Plus, Cap wasn't in this investigation much, there wasn't any in person interaction with Alice until nearly the end. I want this relationship to progress faster! There was a great deal of drawn out exploration of Cap's relationship with his daughter, which was all well and good but way too much time was given to that.

If you're a fan of the series, I do recommend reading this one. I'll be interested to see what happens with these characters in the future. I do hope that the author goes back to the missing person cases instead of these "issues" (human trafficking in the last book, white supremacy in this one) driven plots.

I didn’t think pretty much of anything in this book made sense. From the footballer disappearance to the white nationalists to the weird ending. Maybe she us under pressure to churn these out each year? I think some time was needed to connect some dots and have to all make sense/be believable.

This one was a bit different than the first two Vega books, as it kind of took a turn dealing with a different case related to a network of white supremacists, and at first I was scratching my head a bit. I wasn’t used to this from Vega and wasn’t sure I liked it, plus it was really dragging. However, if you hang in there with it, and if you have read the other two books, we know our Vega is a huge bad ass, and let me tell you, she does NOT disappoint. In fact, she is probably the MOST bad ass she has ever been. And I was here for ALL of it. I will make myself stop here because if I don’t I will spoil it all and I really want you to read this one and experience it as I did.

Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for the advanced digital copy to review.

Alice Vega is back!

In HIDEOUT, she's taken a missing person case, looking for former college football player Zeb Williams who scooped up the ball on the last play of the game, ran the wrong way down the field, and lost the big game for his team (via a safety). Then he disappeared. Thirty years later, Vega's looking for him.

Along the way, she stumbles onto violent acts committed by a group of white supremacists. Never one to back down, Vega takes them on while looking for Zeb. Most of the action takes place in a small town in Oregon.

I don't think I can dislike anything Louisa Luna writes, but I wasn't as captivated by this one as THE JANES (the last Alice Vega installment). It seemed a bit on the long side, and also a little egregiously violent at times (to be fair, this could be my getting soft -- I can't say with certainty whether this book had more aggression from Vega than the last one). Still, I'm looking forward to the next in the series!

Another great installment of the Alice Vega series. As with the previous two, this novel can be read as a standalone. The storyline offers interesting characters, motive, and a bit of humor along the way as Louisa Luna keeps readers glued to the pages of this crime series with investigative procedural, family drama, and some twisted happenings. Highly enjoyable.

Thank you to #NetGalley and #DoubleDayBooks for the ARC of #Hideout which was read and reviewed voluntarily.

Loved this book especially Detective Vega. I want to be her when I grow up! Not only is she a fascinating character, strong, determined, fairly hard core for how she goes after criminals, especially white supremacists, but I love her drive and the ways she goes about solving crimes. I am a big Louisa Luna fan now!

I was excited to read Hideout since I listened to (and loved) the first two Alice Vega books. Alice is pretty darn awesome and I was happy to see her sometimes-partner (and maybe more?) Max Caplan return for this installment, although his involvement was from a distance mostly. A gold star for me in Hideout was getting to know Cap's high school daughter Nell better. Their relationship is great and I loved seeing Nell become somewhat of a Veronica Mars. There was quite a bit more action and violence on the page compared to the prior 2 books in the series, which did not bother me. Although this is not my favorite in the series, I am definitely hoping author Louisa Luna gives us more Alice Vega.

4 stars
This was a first for me. Louisa Luna did an amazing job introducing me to Alice Vega and Max Caplan. In Hideout, these two are not working like they usually do. this is a cold case where someone who literally ran off a football field in the middle of play and disappeared for more than thirty years.

This held my attention all the way. I will be reading more Louisa Luna.

Hideout by Louisa Luna

9780385545532

357 Pages
Publisher: Doubleday Books
Release Date: March 8, 2022

Fiction, General Fiction (Adult), Mystery, Thriller, Hate Group, Violence

Alice Vega is back! She takes a 30-year-old cold case of a missing college football player, Zeb Williams. She is still working with Max Caplan, recently retired from the FBI. This case takes Alice from California to the Pacific Northwest and Max to the Northeast of the country. They share information as they investigate, Max traditionally and Alice very untraditionally. Will Alice be able to find Zeb when other private detectives couldn’t?

This book is a fast paced with very developed characters. We even get a peek into Alice’s family and the dynamics between Max and his daughter, Nell. It is written in the third person point of view. I started this book and did not put it down until I was done. Yes, it was that good. Louisa Luna is a great writer and knows how to weave a story.

A complex, suspenseful plot with tension so thick that it felt palpable. Wonderful characters with depth and substance. I was immediately drawn in and held captive from beginning to end.

#Hideout #NetGalley

*I received a complimentary ARC of this book in order to read and provide a voluntary, unbiased and honest review, should I choose to do so.

Who you gonna call? Alice Vega!

Alice Vega is back and this time she has been called upon to find football player Zeb Williams who literally ran the wrong way and kept on running. Just where did he go? What happened to him? Will Vega find him?

Vega is an interesting, flawed, gritty, strong, and intriguing character. So is Max Caplan. In this book they are up against white supremacists. This is not a simple missing person's case. Plus, there is that dynamic between Vega and Cap. He has an almost grown daughter and wants to work on their relationship and being in her life, and well, you can't really do that if you knee deep in it.

I devoured the previous books in this series, but I found this one hard to get into and once I was there, although I enjoyed this one, it failed to "wow" me as the other books in the series did. I'll still be anxiously waiting for the next book in the series.

Thank you to Text publishing and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions are my own.

I absolutely love Louise Luna's Alice Vega novels -- they're thrilling and tense, complicated but not outlandish, grisly but somehow not exploitative. Vega herself is exactly the sort of terse badass heroine you want to root for, and you can't help but to love Caplan as her softer, more tender foil. HIDEOUT really feels the repercussions of the first two Vega novels, both in terms of the cases & violence the pair have faced and the increasingly complicated status of their relationship, so I would certainly recommend reading the previous novels first. I'm already champing at the bit for Luna's next installment!

This is the third book in the Alice Vega series. I have read each and enjoyed the second two better than the first. For me, Hideout ranks just behind The Two Janes. The character of Alice Vega definitely has some characteristics like Jack Reacher and Evan Smoak (of the Orphan X series), however, she has some distinctly feminine differences. as well as the ability to form and keep attachments., such as with her partner/sometimes-lover Max. I missed more of the interaction between Alice and Max in this installment, but I did enjoy their separate storylines that were happening in the novel. I also loved getting to know Alice's dad and stepmom a bit in this novel. The reader gets much more insight into what makes Alice tick, why she became so independent and even see her recognize some of the flaws in her personal belief system.

While I was most fascinated by the disappearance of Zeb Williams, the book spent more time on a second storyline involving a white nationalist group based in a small, rural Pacific Northwest, US town. Frankly, though this was the less interesting storyline of the two mysteries Alice was trying to solve, it was really nice to see this plot set in another part of the country other than the Southeast, US, which is where so many authors seem to believe all the racists in America live. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed this storyline as well, but it was just heavier to read.

I will be in line for the next book in this series, should the author write a next one. I just wish more people knew about it!

Source: DRC via NetGalley (Doubleday Books, Doubleday)
*Note: This was an unsolicited DRC offer and it was an amazing surprise! Thank you Doubleday!
Pub. Date: March 8, 2022
Synopsis: Goodreads
Previous novels in the series: Two Girls Down, The Janes

Why did I choose to read this book?

I logged into my gmail one day in late February to find this lovely book sitting in my inbox. I did not request it but I was so glad to have early access! I will shout the praises of Louisa Luna to anyone who will listen, and have even bought copies of Two Girls Down and The Janes for friends and family. Honestly it was less about choosing to read this book as it was rushing to read it asap once it was on my Kindle!

What is notable about the story?

There is something about the Alex Vega stories that will hook smart girls down on their luck. The character Alex Vega is a bloodhound that trips over doing what’s right in the process of doing what she’s been paid to do. Those two objectives become so interwoven that you forget what we were doing and you just want Vega to beat the absolute shit out of someone to exact delicious vengeance on behalf of the innocent. In Two Girls Down it was kidnapping, in The Janes it was child trafficking, and in Hideout Vega is in search of a missing football star and stumbles on a nest of white supremacist violence in small town Oregon. As she writes book after book, Luna is commenting not only on the evils festering in American society but probably also about the ways we may have to act in order to burn them away.

Luna has the amazing gift of wrapping you up in the story so you feel as though you are seeing the story through Vega’s eyes. Her books are the most vivid virtual reality; once I looked up and saw I had been reading for an hour without realizing it. There is a sequence towards the end where I was almost panting with anticipation, the revenge so sweet I swear I could taste it. And what makes everything work is that Luna makes us earn the revenge, she gives the action time to settle before we set out with a gun and a glint in our eye.

Was anything not so great?

I want to preface this with the fact that I get it. Max Caplan and Alex Vega got VERY HOT in The Janes, and the nature of both of their characters would be to shy away from each other as though they had been shocked by electricity. Both Caplan and Vega have to think about what they mean to each other, what their work together means for them professionally, and how their entanglement might create unforseen consequences inflicted on the people they love separately (notably Nell, Caplan’s daughter at the end of The Janes).

I understand what she was doing here, and thematically it makes sense so I’m willing to see how it pays off in the next book, but I was still upset about Max essentially being a paranoid dad on the sidelines, just looking for another “thrill of the hunt” bump while trying to be a protective dad, and just being miserable in general. He’s such a good person and he and Vega are so good together, that I really missed having them be together in Hideout. Absence makes the heart grow fonder though, and Luna’s ability to make us earn our moments will undoubtedly pay off for us as readers on this front, so again this is a small quibble because I know the wait will be worth it.

What’s the verdict?

5 stars to Luna on Goodreads, and if you want to see some sweet justice brought down on the heads of white supremacists both old and young (especially since there isn’t a lot of that happening in the real world) go get this absolute gobsmacker of a mystery/thriller. And if you haven’t read them yet, get Two Girls Down and The Janes too, and read them in order to get the heft of the Vega/Caplan development. I promise you won’t be disappointed.