This premise was so fun, but my experience was definitely impacted by some mistakes in marketing. I think to truly enjoy this book, you need to know it is essentially a sequel to Segura's previous work "Secret Identity." I may have to double check, but I don't recall this being in either the Goodreads of NetGalley descriptions. Without that basis, I went through most of this book wondering "why do we even care?" Where is our narrator getting this information from? How is she making these connections? (I gather that all of this background is stuff we would have learned in Secret Identity, but I had no way of knowing that as a new reader.)

Many of my other complaints from this book just come down to things that will hopefully be fixed in editing. The point of view shifts several times mid-sentence, the pacing feels a bit off, and certain descriptors just need to be cleaned up. The story itself was interesting, but nearly impossible for new readers to get invested in or understand. I would love to see a finished copy with the comic panels and final edits because I think that's a fun format for a book. I also may revisit my public star rating after reading Secret Identity to see if that answers any of my questions.

To be published by Flatiron Books in December, 2024

Alex Segura has found a brilliant way around the problem of sequels. ALTER EGO takes place a generation after the events of his comics-based thriller SECRET IDENTITY. Annie Bustamante is a comics artist, a filmmaker, a mother, and a woman with a turbulent past. Her dream is to work on a revived version of The Legendary Lynx, the comic created by Carmen Valdez in the first novel. Segura even manages to give shout outs to other characters in his oeuvre— investigator Peter Fernandez from his Miami series and The Dusk, the subject of his forthcoming comic series. You don’t need to be a comics nerd to enjoy this fast-paced thriller, but it helps. Names, real and imagined are dropped. Mostly, ALTER EGO is a story about mothers and daughters, about missing fathers, and about the intense world of intellectual property. The novel is illustrated with some sample pages from a Lynx comic, which were unavailable in the NetGalley version.

I'm not very knowledgeable about comics, and I didn't realize this was a sequel until toward the end of the book, so some of the backstory was unclear to me, but nevertheless I found it quite absorbing. A Cuban-American woman from Miami who grew up loving a comics, and in particular one about a woman superhero she really identified with, is contacted about helping a sketchy company with a reboot. Then it all gets complicated, Quite a lot of time is spent on the artist's childhood friendship that fell apart and the quest to find the woman behind the original comic.

My favorite parts being the narrator's voice and her description and her creative approach to the art of comics. The thriller plot was fine, too, and certainly kept me turning the pages, though I kept thinking "all this violence over an intellectual property claim?" But it gets explained in a way that works. At times the recitation of famous artists and publishers was a bit much for me, but readers who are into comics will feel seen.

Alex Segura does it again. This is a worthy successor to Secret Identity. I loved this book; it's one of my favorites for the year. It'll have you staying up all night just to see what happens next.