When I started reading Alter Ego, Brian Freeman’s latest, I kept thinking “wait, I KNOW this Jonathan Stride, a cop from Duluth, I recognize his house…” But then I thought maybe I was getting him mixed up with a character in John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport/Virgil Flowers series – or maybe it was in one of Owen Laukkanen’s Kirk Stevens/Carla Windermere series – holy crap,  how many mystery/thrillers are set in Minnesota, right? Apparently, quite a few! But I couldn’t recall anything specific, so I plunged in.

First off, Brian Freeman is a master at creating setting. I kept feeling cold reading about Duluth in the winter. Then, I got WARM when his characters moved to the sticky humid heat of Florida. It’s awesome, actually.

And just the way he hooks the reader in: on the first pages, a freakish accident on a remote snowy Minnesota highway in January seems straightforward…until the driver turns out to have a wad of cash, a recently fired gun, and seems to be a “ghost” with no identity.

Then, a college coed disappears – are the two incidents related? But why would a person who looks like a hired assassin be mixed up with a coed? And it turns out that an LA-based movie crew with an award-winning megastar (think Tom Cruise, maybe?) is shooting on location in Duluth for a major film based on Stride’s own exploits and that whole operation has some weird things going on.

Readers familiar with the other books in the Jonathan Stride series will encounter some familiar characters, including Serena Stride, Jonathan’s wife (also a cop), Cat Mateo, the teenager who was a prominent character in an earlier Stride book, and Maggie Bei, Stride’s Chinese-American partner with whom he has a complicated history. As I read about them, bits of memory began to surface (oh RIGHT, I remembered Maggie’s quirky/prickly personality and Cat’s traumatic history…and Stride’s house, by the shores of the lake. In winter. Duluth in January. In freezing weather.

The title refers to Dean Casperson, the star of the film, the man playing the character based on Stride. He  is Stride’s alter ego, actually, and somehow is creepy from the get-go. But how could he be involved in what seems to be the work of a serial killer?

Freeman is great at developing the characters and furthering their stories, setting up future exploits in Duluth. As for plot, I am one of those people who pretty much NEVER figures out the plot, so maybe it isn’t that significant that I was surprised by the revelations in the last 20% of the book.

So, I was right: when I finished the book, I looked on goodreads and I DID know the character. Turns out that in 2014 I read The Cold Nowhere, #6 in the Jonathan Stride series, and I liked it a lot (on goodreads it is marked as “new-author-I-like”) so I’m clueless as to how I have missed other books in the series. The two Stride books I have read are both totally able to be read as standalone novels, but I sort of wish I had at least read #7 and #8 to be totally up to speed on the events in the lives of the characters in between my enjoyment of #6 and #9. Apparently Cab Bolton, who plays a big part in Alter Ego, appeared in Freeman’s book The Bone House (Cab Bolton series #1) as well as earlier in the Stride series (and I would bet money that we will see Cab again!)

I loved this book. Yes, I am an “easy grader” in my real life, which may blend into my reviewing life, but I give this 5 stars and thank Quercus Publishing and NetGalley for a copy of Alter Ego in exchange for my honest review. Highly recommended.