**Named A BEST BOOK of the Year by NPR, The Sun Sentinel, Deadly
Pleasures, and more
**
**Anthony Award-winning writer Alex Segura delivers a "masterful 1970s
literary mystery" (NPR) set in the world of comics that is "as engaging
as Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay." (Sun
Sentinel)
**
It's 1975 and the comic book industry is struggling, but Carmen Valdez
doesn't care. She's an assistant at Triumph Comics, which doesn't have
the creative zeal of Marvel nor the buttoned-up efficiency of DC, but it
doesn't matter. Carmen is tantalizingly close to fulfilling her dream of
writing a superhero book.
That dream is nearly a reality when one of the Triumph writers enlists
her help to create a new character, which they call "The Lethal Lynx,"
Triumph's first female hero. But her colleague is acting strangely and
asking to keep her involvement a secret. And then he's found dead, with
all of their scripts turned into the publisher without her name. Carmen
is desperate to piece together what happened to him, to hang on to her
piece of the Lynx, which turns out to be a runaway hit. But that's
complicated by a surprise visitor from her home in Miami, a tenacious
cop who is piecing everything together too quickly for Carmen, and the
tangled web of secrets and resentments among the passionate eccentrics
who write comics for a living.
Alex Segura uses his expertise as a comics creator as well as his
unabashed love of noir fiction to create a truly one-of-a-kind
novel--hard-edged and bright-eyed, gritty and dangerous, and utterly
absorbing.
