ALTER EGO

Segura explores the world of comic books and film in his latest thriller.

Segura’s standalone sequel to Secret Identity (2022) brings back the Lynx, a comic book character co-created by Carmen Valdez in the 1970s. Decades have passed, and the Lynx—originally published by a company called Triumph—has faded into obscurity, though she still has her admirers. Chief among them is Annie Bustamante, a comic book writer who turned to film after having become disenchanted: “Comics had chewed me up and spit me out, and at the moment I wasn’t sure I wanted to go for another twelve rounds.” But now Annie’s movie career has stalled, too, after her studio declined to release her latest, an "artsy superhero thriller" called Miss Midnight, turning it into a tax write-off instead. She's approached by Bert Carlyle, the son of Triumph’s founder, who wants her to work with Arturo Spinoza, a filmmaker, to reintroduce the Lynx across a wide range of media. Annie can’t bring herself to say no; the Lynx was a formative character for her as a young woman: “It was one of the first and few comics I could remember not only featuring a woman in the lead, but one that—at least for a brief time—was written by a woman, too. A Cuban woman like me, no less.” Things are looking up, until Annie starts to get messages saying “BE CAREFUL,” and realizes that her involvement with the Lynx might be putting her in real danger. While the novel doesn’t quite live up to the heights of Secret Identity—the dialogue here can come across as forced—Segura has lost none of his talent at building suspense. Readers will need to come with their disbelief fully suspended, but Segura is charming enough to make it work, and, as in his last book, he sticks the landing beautifully.

A ride worth taking, especially for comic book fans.