Louisa Luna – författare

When Louisa Luna first made the scene with the acclaimed BRAVE NEW GIRL, a gritty high school drama with a sympathic heroine named Doreen, she established herself as one of the most promising voices of her generation. Now, Luna more than fulfills this promise with CROOKED, an ambitious novel of startling emotional immediacy and maturity. Melody is just out of prison. Faced with the absence of her brother Gary, who's serving life in San Quentin, and hardened by her own experiences in lock-up, Mel, as she likes to be called, struggles to adjust to the harsh realities of life on the outside. She quickly discovers that freedom is relative, she has no money, no prospects, no guidance. Forced to return to her formerly abusive mother's apartment in Marin County and take on a soul-crushing job hauling port-a-potties, Mel finds herself drinking too much and hanging out with her old gang again. Mel offers us glimpses of her harrowing girlhood, revisits the murky circumstances that put her in prison in the first place, and bravely begins to forge a potential path toward redemption and escape.

Queenie Sells is having what she thinks is a good day. After getting fired from her job at a calendar company for botching daylight saving time, she lands a job offer from a wealthy acquaintance who's trying to track down his girlfriend, a stripper named Trigger Happy. Sounds easy enough -- until Queenie finds Trigger dead in her own apartment. Now that she's become both suspect for the murder and the target for an unknown predator, Queenie's on the run. Hopping from bar to bar, from Coney Island clam stands to the Waldorf-Astoria, she inadvertently lands on the trail of Trigger's killer, putting herself in the line of fire. Along the way she meets Rey, a private eye with a soft spot for tough-talking ladies; Detective Olds, the stuttering cop who thinks Queenie's the culprit; and a dozen New York denizens -- some strange, some sad, some sweet, and some deadly, every one dropping in and out of Queenie's life as she searches for each fragile piece of the puzzle that may eventually lead her to the truth -- before the next body that turns up is her own.

Dr. Caroline is accustomed to hearing her patients’ deepest, darkest secrets, but it seems there is something more to Nelson Schack than meets the eye. When detectives show up later that day, inquiring about a missing woman, it looks like Nelson has made good on his threat - yet somehow it’s Dr. Caroline who becomes the prime suspect.Convinced the police are incompetent, Dr. Caroline takes matters into her own hands, chasing down the elusive Nelson and running headlong into a past she has spent her entire life trying to forget. As she closes in on her target, people begin questioning who Dr. Caroline really is, and all the polished pieces of her manicured life start to splinter.Harrowing, unpredictable, and compulsively readable, the award-winning author Louisa Luna’s Tell Me Who You Are is an utterly gripping psychological thriller that asks, Can a person ever really outrun their past?