Louisa Luna Books in Order

If you want the full Alice Vega story: Two Girls Down → The Janes → Hideout
If you want a stand-alone psychological thriller: Tell Me Who You Are
If you want Luna's earlier adult noir: Crooked → Serious as a Heart Attack
If you want her YA debut: Brave New Girl

Louisa Luna was born and raised in San Francisco, and that city's mix of beauty, speed, and rough edges still feels close to her work. She now lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.

Her path to crime fiction was not a straight line.

In her twenties, Luna published three novels, Brave New Girl, Crooked, and Serious as a Heart Attack. They were not the Alice Vega books readers know her for now, but you can already see some of her lasting interests: outsiders, messy families, young women under pressure, dark humor, and people trying to stay upright when life keeps knocking them sideways. The sales story was uneven, and after those early books she stopped writing for a while.

Then she found her way back. Luna has said that she began writing Two Girls Down in 2012, and it took about three years to finish because she was fitting it around a full-time job and raising a young child. Becoming a mother sharpened the fear at the heart of the book. She has described the novel as a way of putting some of her deepest anxieties on the page, then turning them into a story.

That restart changed the course of her career.

Two Girls Down, published in 2018, introduced bounty hunter turned investigator Alice Vega and former cop Max Caplan, one of those crime-fiction pairings that works because the people in it are so different. Vega is blunt, fearless, and impatient with nonsense. Cap is steadier, quieter, and better at easing information out of people. Readers who fall for Luna's thrillers usually point to that balance, along with the speed of the plotting and the way the books never lose sight of the families and victims at the center of the case.

She built on that in The Janes and Hideout. The first follows Vega and Cap into a case involving unidentified young women, trafficking, and the machinery that lets vulnerable people disappear. The second turns toward a cold case and a violent extremist group in southern Oregon. In 2023, Hideout received the Sue Grafton Memorial Award, a notable honor for the third Vega novel.

Luna has also shown that she is not limited to one kind of suspense. Tell Me Who You Are moves into psychological thriller territory, with a Brooklyn psychiatrist whose careful, polished life starts to crack after a disturbing patient arrives in her office. It is a different setup from the Vega books, but the pull is familiar: sharp dialogue, pressure that keeps building, and a strong interest in what people hide from each other and from themselves.

Across her books, Luna returns again and again to people on the margins, people in danger, and people who do not fit neatly into the systems around them. She writes missing persons cases, troubled families, ex-cops, drifters, teenagers, and survivors without sanding off their edges.

These days, she is still based in Brooklyn. The work keeps changing shape, but the nerve in it is easy to spot.