Private investigator Alice Vega returns (after Two Girls Down) in Louisa Luna's gritty The Janes, in which she's hired to find the killer of two underage girls whose bodies were dumped. The trail leads Vega and her partner, Max "Cap" Caplan, to San Diego, Calif., where they discover the girls had been sex trafficked from Mexico, and more minors are likely being held as sex slaves where the dead girls came from.
As Vega gets closer to unearthing the killer and sex trafficking ring, however, her investigation is hampered by the people who hired her. Determined to rescue the other girls before more end up dead, Vega and Cap go rogue to mete out their own brand of justice.
Vega is like a female Joe Pike, someone of few words and lethal action who likes to keep the shades on. She's mostly inscrutable, even though the narrative is from her point of view, but her sense of right and wrong is crystal clear. What she does with a pair of bolt cutters is terrifying, and bad guys should never question whether she means what she says. Cap is a nice guy whose perspective tells half of the story, but the moments in which he gazes at her body without her knowledge are somewhat cringe-inducing. At least he keeps his thoughts to himself and doesn't say or do anything inappropriate; he respects Vega's space and skills. Together they wrap up the case in a violent climactic showdown, and find that mercy and righteousness don't always result in a happy ending. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd