Read an excerpt from Secret Identity, a tale of ’70s noir set in the cutthroat world of making comics

polygon.com:

It’s every budding comic author’s not-so-secret dream to finally make their mark on the industry and have their name emblazoned on the cover of their very own original book. But for Carmen Valdez, the protagonist of Alex Segura’s latest book Secret Identity: A Novel, that dream turns into a living noir nightmare.

An assistant working at Triumph Comics, Valdez is given the opportunity of a lifetime when she’s enlisted to help one of the company’s head writers create Triumph’s very first female superhero, “The Lethal Lynx.” All seems to be going well, until the writer turns up dead and all the scripts for the new hero are turned into the publisher without Valdez’s name.

Desperate to assert her claim to the Lynx and piece together what happened to her boss, Valdez finds herself drawn into a tangled web of secrets when a tenacious cop pays her a visit at her Miami home, presenting her with a mystery that feels ripped straight from the pages of pulp comic.

To celebrate the book’s release this week, we’re publishing an exclusive excerpt from Alex Segura’s Secret Identity here at Polygon. The book also includes bits of the actual Lethal Lynx comic itself, drawn by artist Sandy Jarrell with lettering by Taylor Esposito, which you can read below the excerpt.

“Just pretend it never happened.”

Detmer’s voice was haggard, each word crawling out of his cigar-­chomping mouth. Carmen watched as the artist leaned over his drawing table, his left hand swiftly bringing to life a dynamic, lively sketch of the Lynx. She was swinging through the city, her face determined. Her original costume restored, her figure looking more fit than foxy. This was the Lynx they knew. The real Lynx, Carmen thought.

Detmer, on the other hand, had changed