<i>Hideout by Louisa Luna is the third Alice Vega novel. It shares the story of a thirty-year-old missing person case that takes Alice to a small-town troubled by a white supremacists network. Suspense and clever detective work will hook readers from the start.</i>

While Luna does an excellent job of re-introducing Alice Vega and Max Caplan, I recommend reading the series in the order of its release. It contains spoilers regarding their relationship and previous cases.

Things are strained between Alice and Max after the last case they worked together. When she is offered a lot of money to take on the missing persons case of football star Zeb Williams. She is hesitant, but Alice loves a good mystery.

Zeb went missing in 1984 during the Cal-Stanford football. He basically took the ball and ran off field, never to be seen again. His girlfriend’s father tracked him down to a small-town in southern Oregon, but the trail went cold. Armed only with an old photograph, Alice begins there. Only she finds more than she bargained for. The small town is under siege by a local hate group called the Liberty Boys.

The tale that unfolds was dark, gritty, suspenseful and shed light on some of the darker aspects of rural America. Vega gets herself into some serious trouble and it ends up creeping out to her family and friends, but she is determined.

While Alice Vega has issues, I love her. The girl is fearless. The way she wrangled this town, and these predators, was addictive to watch. She truly is a champion for the helpless.

Max and his daughter also worked a case and hashed through some things. Max and Alice struggled, but we were left in a good place. I really enjoy these characters and the author does a nice balancing act by allowing us to get to know them more in depth and providing a page-turner of a mystery.

Fans of suspenseful mysteries and private investigators will enjoy the Alice Vega series and Hideout.

This is book 3 in the Alice Vega series. Alice Vega is used to finding people on a timeline. When she is given a 30 year old missing persons case, she is thrown into unfamiliar circumstances. In her search for Zeb Williams, her search leads her to southern Oregon, and while there, she runs into a local hate group. While she is there, she runs into deeper mysteries and danger.

Louisa Luna tackles white supremacy in a small Oregon town in her latest Alice Vega thriller. Vega, a private investigator based in California who specializes in finding missing persons, is hired to find a young man named Zeb Williams who went missing on November 17, 1984, and was last spotted in Ilona, OR. Alice goes to Oregon and starts digging around but becomes distracted by reports of bullying and property damage performed by young men who belong to an alt-right group calling themselves LibertyPure. Is the local sheriff involved or just looking the other way? Boys will be boys?

She tries to interest her sometimes partner and lover, Max Caplan, in joining her in her current investigation but he is too involved in personal problems at home at the moment to agree. Besides, he's a bit miffed that he hasn't heard from Vega in months. So she goes it alone.

There seem to be several people who don't want her looking into any of this and they take matters into their own hands to warn her off. Vega comes back to get some revenge and settle some wrongs--she's a little like Jack Reacher that way. Good action, plot twists and a surprising conclusion make for an exciting, satisfying thriller read.

I received an arc of this new novel from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Many thanks for the opportunity to read more of Vega's exploits. (

Alice never asks why her client wants her to find his wife's college love Zeb Williams, a star kicker who went missing 30 years ago, she just sets out to do it. What she finds in the hunt is far more important and dangerous. The small town in Oregon where he was last seen is a hotbed for a hate group and she quickly runs afoul of them. At the same time, her sometime partner Max Caplan, is in Philadelphia and worrying about his talented teen daughter Nell. Luna hits the right balance with Nell, a smart kid with a secret of her own who cares a lot about her dad. Alice's investigation leads her down several paths, with interesting characters along the way. She is one determined woman with a strong sense of justice- her quest for Zeb becomes less important to her than Cara and others who have been impacted by hate. Super. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. I'd not read the earlier books so this was a standalone for me and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm definitely hoping to see Alice- and Max and Nell again. There are twists and surprises (no spoilers) in this page turner.

I received this book from Netgalley in exchange from an honest review. I think you have to read the first two books to get the characters in this book. Vega is an unique investigator that can solve hard mysteries. In this book, she is dealing with a very old cold case. It was good, but for me slow. I might try reading the first two.

I really like Alice. She is very unusual and very focused on her task. That's what makes her a good investigator. It also gets her into trouble. When she went to the small town in Oregon, she found trouble. She was looking for a missing person and found a hate group. And they hated her immediately. Thought she was sticking her nose where it didn't belong. Alice couldn't stand by and watch the injustices that were being done by these people. After she was beaten badly, she came back for more. She would not let them get away with it. Can she bring justice to the small town and find her missing person?

Title: Hideout
Author: Louisa Luna
Genre: Mystery/thriller
Rating: 4 out of 5

Alice Vega has made a career of finding the missing and vulnerable against a ticking clock, but she's never had a case like Zeb Williams, missing for over thirty years. It was 1984, and the big Cal-Stanford football game was tied with seconds left on the clock. Zeb Williams grabbed the ball and ran the wrong way, through the marching band, off the field and out of the stadium. He disappeared into legend, replete with Elvis-like sightings and a cult following.

Zeb's cold trail leads Vega to southern Oregon, where she discovers an anxious community living under siege by a local hate group called the Liberty Boys. As Vega starts digging into the past, the mystery around Zeb's disappearance grows deeper, and the reach of the Liberty Boys grows more disturbing. Everyone has something to hide, and no one can cut to the truth like Alice Vega. But this time, her partner Max Caplan has his own problems at home, and the trouble Vega finds might be too much for her to handle.

I enjoyed this read. I liked that there were actually two mysteries here; what happened to Zeb and what the Liberty Boys were up to. Strong writing and vivid characterization hooked me in, but let’s be honest: Alice Vega is not the easiest character to relate to. She’s very prickly, standoffish, and analytical, which makes her come across as cold, but I like the effect Caplan has on her. This is a bit of a dark read, but it’s an engrossing one.

Louisa Luna lives in Brooklyn. Hideout is her newest novel.

(Galley courtesy of Doubleday in exchange for an honest review.)

(Blog link live 3/17.)

An excellent installment of the Vega series. She's a little more vulnerable in this one, and I like it.

Bring on the next!

Thanks to Netgalley for the free copy in exchange for an honest review.

I loved the first two books in this series, which makes writing this review difficult. Hideout just didn’t work for me.

In the previous books, Alice Vega was a likable badass. Here, the likable aspect was mostly missing. Instead she came off as robotic and devoid of emotion.

I don’t know what was going on with Caplan in this book. Rather than working alongside Vega, he remained on his own, staying in his house, sulking and not doing much of anything until near the end of the story. His character was a mess, coming off as whiny, needy, and completely incapable of managing the basics of life, much less an investigation. He needed his teenage daughter to boss him around.

The plot was a stretch in plausibility.

While this one was a big disappointment for me, I’m holding out hope that Vega and Caplan will be back together, and back to themselves, in the next book.

The adventures of Alice Vega continue as she searches for a missing person. There is plenty of action to keep the reader engaged and some great dialog that enhances the reader experience. While several bumps in the road try to derail her, Alice never stops working the case. A strong female leads the way with grit and determination.

I stumbled upon the Alice Vega novels in 2020 and loved this tough, fierce, and fearless woman who let nothing prevent her from find her missing persons. Now she's back, but this time she's working on a case of a man who went missing 30 years ago. The coldness of the case doesn't have the same "immediacy" as her prior two, but she quickly stumbles upon a ring of white supremacists which ups the ante - and picks up the pace of the narrative. Vega seems a little more subdued in this one, and there's the added developing relationship between her and her sometimes partner, Max Caplan. If you haven't read the prior two, you could still jump in with this one. Alice reminds me of a mix of Jack Reacher and John Wick - she's going to get the job done, but it is most definitely going to be violent. There were a couple of loose ends that I wanted to see tied up that didn't get explained, but other than that, this is another great episode in the Vega series.

An intricately written novel. Alice Vega is a one woman wrecking ball. She is able to get in and investigate and solve problems where others have failed. She is focused and determined. Her only weakness is Max Caplan. Max is a retired detective who sometimes helps Alice on cases and also became her lover. It is a fascinating story of righting a wrong and bringing down the bad guys. They restore some of the goodness by given back a voice to the voiceless.

Hideout is the third book in the Alice Vega series. it definitely can be read as a standalone and I plan to read the earlier books, time permitting. Alice is a specialist in missing persons, usually recently missing and, from what I can tell, endangered people. But this time she has a client who will pay the bills for awhile. She's tasked with finding Zeb Williams, a man who disappeared after playing a memorable role in a UC Berkley/Stanford football game in the early 1980s. His girlfriend, from an obscenely wealthy family moved on and for unclear reasons, her husband wants Vega to find Zeb. There is one picture of him in an Oregon town, Ilona, taken soon after Zeb disappeared, then nothing. Vega has history with Max Caplan, divorced father of Nell who is heading to college soon. They were partners in some of her extremely dangerous work and he has been traumatized by an earlier case when Nell was held hostage. Vega takes extreme chances and it does not always go well for her or for those around her. Cap declines to get involved in this case, even though he is smitten with and respects Vega. Nell's story is a nice thread throughout. I do not write reviews with spoilers, but the overall theme of the book is that something smells bad in Ilona, Oregon and it involves older men with power and teenaged boys who have been drawn into white supremacist groups. With her faithful hacker Bandit and her ability to connect dots with his information and her on legwork, Vega does her thing, once more putting those in her life in danger. A well-written mystery with a few twists, but a few things become clear early. That's fine though.. Good cast of villains, frightened townspeople and those brave enough to conquer fear.

This is the first book I've read by Louisa Luna, but I fully intend to go back and read books 1 and 2 in this series. It was a great read and I enjoyed the relationships between Alice, Max, and Max's daughter.

The search for a long-missing football player that leads to investigating a white supremacist movement kept the action moving and made me wonder what would happen next.

If you like mysteries with a strong female MC, this is definitely a must read!

Thank you to Netgalley, the author, and publisher for an ARC at my request. All thoughts are my own.

Louisa Luna is the author of three books with Alice Vega as the protagonist, an investigator who specializes in finding missing persons. The complimentary character is Max Caplan. The first book in the series was reviewed by ECD in 2017, and his comments were favorable. I was presented with this prepublication novel. I thought the opening of this third book, Hideout, was fun. Zeb Williams was the place kicker for the football team at Berkeley in the early 1980’s. At The Big Game against Stanford in his senior year, he made a bizarre choice. The game was tied and rather than kick the ball for the game winning field goal in the last seconds, he grabbed the ball from his older, ran the length of the field scoring a touchdown for Stanford, and then he kept running through the stadium, to the parking lot, and he was never heard from again. The event was famous, and lots of effort failed to find him.

30 years later, Vega was hired to find him. There were some interesting characters in the small town where most of the action took place, but that’s really the last positive comment I have to make. I could not identify with any of the characters who mostly I did not find believable. I thought the concluding section of the book was bizarre, out of the blue, and disappointing. This book does not get my recommendation.

Not my favorite in this series. I didn't like Vega and Cap being split up almost into two different stories. Vega is a strong female investigator with an amazing way of getting people to tell her things that they would not normally reveal to others. But her escapades are not believable in some cases in this latest edition of the series.

I'll be honest. I didn't recall this series, but I went back to my old reviews. I loved the first book. I then read the second one in a night (which was really good!) and dove into this one, the third. Awesome. Alex Vega is the best character. She is a no-nonsense, won't take your bullshit badass. I love the back and forth with Max. I hope there's another in the series so I can read more of her! Louisa Luna is definitely one of the best crime writers out there today.

Thanks so much NetGalley and Doubleday books.

This is somewhere between and 3 and 4 star, but I rounded down. I loved the first 2 in this series, but in this one it felt like Cap was a minor side character and Alice was a psychopathic robot with zero emotion and a lot of violent tendencies. It's been a while since I read the first two, so I can't recall if she was like this in before, but wow. There was not even very much inner dialogue with her, just a lot of play by play (Vega did this, then put on her shirt, then turned off the light, then walked down the hall), which I think contributed to her coming off robotic.

The story was compelling, though. A missing college football kicker who, instead of kicking the ball, grabbed it and ran the opposite way, scoring for the opposing team, and then disappeared? And then pretty quickly into the investigation Vega discovers links to a cell of white supremacists? Super catchy. I was disappointed in the eventual explaining of why the footballer did what he did, but it was all written satisfactorily enough.

Detective Alice Vega is back in her third series installment, Hideout; searching for missing football player Zeb Williams who ran the wrong way on the field in the final seconds of a tied game, disappearing from the stadium and in to local legend 30 years ago.
Vega finds herself in Oregon thanks to a small clue but her search for Zeb is interrupted by a disturbing group of white supremacists. These two unrelated cases seemed an odd combination but as readers see Vega handle this case solo (her partner Cap from the first two books in the series is dealing with his own stuff at home) we learn more about the enigmatic detective than we have previously. This is another slow burn thriller but this time we see a whole new level of badass from Vega and I was here for every second of it!
While I was required to suspend my disbelief a tad more than I expected, I enjoyed getting to understand Alice Vega a bit more and am hopeful the next book will see Vega and Cap reunited with a case as strong as the first two books.
Thanks to Doubleday and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review. Hideout is scheduled for release on March 8, 2022.

Hideout is the newest Alice Vega thriller. Vega is the queen of finding the lost, a private detective with some pretty unique skills and who isn’t afraid of getting her hands dirty to solve a case. A rich client wants Alice to find a college legend, Zeb Williams, who ran the wrong way and just kept running. A plan is still dealing with some ptsd from their last joint adventure, so Vega travels alone to the last place Zeb was seen, southern Oregon. Following clues in the small town, Alice finds a band of white supremacists harassing the locals. Never one to let injustice stand, Vega jumps feet first into danger on a wild ride rife with trouble and action and a touch of vigilante justice. In the background is always the hints of romance between Alice and Max but the story is an action packed thriller in the supreme sense of the word. My voluntary, unbiased review is based upon a review copy from NetGalley.