This literary mystery follows Carmen Valdez, an assistant at Triumph Comics in 1975. Carmen has loved comics since childhood and followed her dream of one day writing a comic all the way to NYC from her childhood home in Miami. She's tried pitching multiple ideas to her boss at Triumph, with no success. But then one of the writers at Triumph who Carmen is friendly with enlists her help creating a new character. And not just any character, but Triumph's first female superhero. The writer wants to keep Carmen's involvement a secret, planning to reveal her as a co-writer later once the comic is successful. But before any of that can happen, he is found dead and all the scripts they worked on together only bear his name. Through her grief and frustration, Carmen starts piecing together what happened to him and if he was actually a friend to her at all.
TW/CW: infidelity, suicide
Unsurprisingly, the comic industry aspect is key to the story and I think it was woven really well into the plot. I'm a pretty casual fan of comics - translation: I like watching the movies/tv shows that are being made recently but I've never really read comics - so I really wasn't bringing in any sort of background knowledge or personal history to this read. So of course there were things about the comic industry that I didn't know but Segura did a great job of trickling in this information to the reader. There was a pretty lengthy set up to this book (we don't see the body drop until about the 40% mark) and that long set up time gave the reader plenty of space to get acclimated to this setting and these characters. We get to see not only Carmen's interactions with the people at her office, but we get a good sense of the industry as a whole. I really enjoyed some of the more philosophical conversations about comics and their impact on society as a whole. Based on the acknowledgements at the end of the book, Segura did a ton of research and talked to a lot of people about this time in the comic industry and I think that amount of care and dedication really comes through in the story. There were many times where this really felt like a love letter to comics and what they can mean to people even if they aren't considered 'high literature'.
I absolutely adored Carmen as a character and thought she was so well developed. As I mentioned previously, we spend a good amount of time being introduced to this world and Carmen before the real meat of the plot gets started. Segura uses this lead time to really immerse the reader in Carmen's character and her view on the world she's moving through. We get to know her experiences as a woman in the comic industry in the 1970s but also get to see how her love of comics propels her forward in her day to day. We're introduced to her parents back in Miami that she is semi-estranged from for a reason to be discovered later. We see her walk this tightrope of knowing how much she can speak up at her office and give her opinions on the comics, writers, and artists before she crosses some invisible line of propriety. By the time she accepts the deal to co-write a comic, the reader has seen just how much the day to day grind is slowly crushing Carmen's spirit and passion for the industry. The first 1/3 of the book or so really reads more like a literary fiction where we're following this woman through her daily motions and interpersonal interactions. The character development doesn't stop when the mystery kicks in, if anything, both the reader and Carmen discover new aspects to her character.
The pacing for this story wasn't exactly what I was expecting but I think it was successful overall. I thought that this would be more of a noir mystery set in the 1970s so the long lead in was throwing me off a bit. I wasn't bored at all, but there was a sense of waiting for the shoe to drop because we're told in the description that there's a death that Carmen investigates. I don't know if the official description has been changed from when I saw it initially on NetGalley, but I think calling this a literary mystery is a much more apt description. We don't get a body drop until about the 40% mark and Carmen doesn't start investigating in earnest until about 60%. Coming from the mystery side, that is very late to have the actual mystery start and it did make me worried that maybe the ending would be rushed (more on that point later). However, with the framing that this is more of a lit-fic with a mystery element the pacing felt a lot more natural. As I said above, I really enjoyed the long set up following Carmen in her day to day and learning about the comic industry. But if readers were, like myself, expecting this to be a more traditionally paced mystery story they might be a bit disappointed.
Despite my previous note about the mystery not starting until really the 60% mark, I think Segura pulled off a pretty intriguing mystery. It definitely wasn't as twisty and complex as I was expecting, but it still had some good dead ends and reveals in the investigation. I think the narrative moved very seamlessly from lit-fic to mystery without shifting in tone or style which was great. Carmen's investigation was interspersed with more of the daily grind scenes that we've been getting all along. I think in a lot of mysteries, the investigating character often 'loses themselves' in the investigation and sort of shuns all other aspects of their lives until the case is solved. In this case, we see Carmen still showing up to work, talking with her roommate, etc. I really enjoyed how all the information we got early on in the story does come into play in the mystery investigation rather than the solution being completely out of left field. I do think the actual investigation was wrapped up pretty quickly and I, personally, would have enjoyed a few more twists.
Overall, this was a really fantastic read. Carmen is an incredibly compelling character and I loved being so immersed in the world of comics. I do think the pacing and mystery were a little different than what I was expecting, but they worked out well in the end (especially once I re-framed my expectations around this being a literary mystery).
Thanks to NetGalley and Flatiron Books for the ARC
Expected publication is March 15, 2022
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