It’s hard to pinpoint the exact inspiration for my latest book, Two Girls Down, but the simplest answer is that I had a kid, and I felt like I understood something beautiful and terrifying about life. I started writing it when she was two, and the plot kick-off was pretty much my deepest fears laid out on the page (two sisters disappearing from a mall parking lot), so I suppose it was therapeutic in a way. I pulled a lot from my own imagination, and I read books about missing persons and children which were all harrowing, deeply sad and disturbing stories. The grief that the parents and family of missing persons/children feel is just bottomless and never goes away.
Of course I also wanted to tell a good story with unforgettable characters, especially a strong female protagonist, and so, enter Alice Vega. I knew I wanted to write a character who was tough and smart and could slice through all the weeds with one cut. Salander from Dragon Tattoo was an influence but I wanted mine to be a little older and well-established in her career path.
The challenge was to make Vega realistic – I wanted her to take no shit and do anything to get the job done, and I wanted her to be the smartest person in the room. And I wanted it to be believable that she could fight anyone at any time. All the research I did about bounty hunters (Vega’s former job) indicated that there are very few women in that line of work, and the women who make that their livelihoods are physically built for the job – tall and burly and able to take a bail jumper down through hand-to-hand combat. I wanted to build Vega average-size, physically, but still very strong, and I knew in order to sell that on the page, she would have to use every other tool at her disposal as well – namely words and weapons. That informed a lot of her character along with her ability to read people and figure out what they need the most.
But I think the real key to Vega is that she has no fear of pain or death. She has the ability to will herself not to feel things. Once I realized that about her, there was a great deal of freedom there because she literally has nothing to lose. She’s also a pretty economical character, and I don’t mean in the monetary sense; I mean she only deals in what is useful to her. I think she has found that fear is not useful in her life and work so she excised it at some point. The rub is she’s still human so she experiences fear and guilt and love but she’ll do her best to stop those emotions if they’re not serving her in some way.
It was great to take her through this story where she runs up against people who make her feel things in spite of herself. Her relationship with Cap, the ex-cop she partners with to find the missing girls, is so complex and takes her by complete surprise – contentious at first and then with an element of attraction and eventually genuine trust, which is not something she dispenses lightly.
And I’m happy to say they’ll both be back in the sequel!
Two Girls Down by Louisa Luna is published 11th April (Text Publishing, £10.99).
When two young sisters disappear from a strip mall parking lot in a small Pennsylvania town, their devastated mother hires an enigmatic bounty hunter, Alice Vega, to help find the girls. Immediately shut out by a local police department already stretched thin by budget cuts and the growing OxyContin and meth epidemic, Vega enlists the help of a disgraced former cop, Max Caplan. Cap is a man trying to put the scandal of his past behind him and move on, but Vega needs his help to find the girls, and she will not be denied. With little to go on, Vega and Cap will go to extraordinary lengths to untangle a dangerous web of lies, false leads, and complex relationships to find the girls before time runs out, and they are gone forever.
More information about the author can be found on her website.
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