I would probably give this 5 stars if I liked the artwork more. I do like a lot of the cover art designs.
This was a pretty good mystery. I like the way these books are structured as smaller stories within a larger arc. It’s much more satisfying to read a series that isn’t a continuous run of cliffhangers leading to the next book. The Maria Hill arc was good, and I liked the progress Jessica made patching things up with Luke. Also, the scene with Danny Rand was very sweet. ( )

I love how Bendis is able to thread Jessica's stories in, through, and around the greater Marvel superhero universe. This volume shows that genius in that Maria Hill's background is effortlessly turned into a fascinating (and tragic) mystery for Jones to unravel.

Well done. ( )

The Secrets Of Maria Hill is a great follow-up to Uncaged! (the first collection from this Jessica Jones series). It continues with its gritty, all too believable take on the mainstream Marvel universe through the jaundiced eye of a non-mainstream character. It brings us a much-needed, rehabilitating awareness of the ridiculousness of the problems of superhero social circles. Showing how someone outside the world-altering-crisis embedded main characters of Marvel sees the absurdity of their lives like real people might see them from up close, we get a new sense of how the general public (observing these things only from far away) might get caught up in the pomp and circumstance, and miss much of the insanity; and of how those superheroic main characters might get numbed to the ludicrous state of their own lives, losing all sense of proportion and normalcy. As a result, reading these Jessica Jones stories helps keep the rest of the Marvel universe in some kind of reasonable perspective, and helps keept it interesting and perhaps believable enough to keep reading without it all wearing too thin or just seeming too goofy to take seriously.

That's just the context, applicable not only to this volume and the preceding first volume in this series, but to the entire, previous Alias series as well. In addition, the story is fantastic in its own right, the plotting is tightly engineered, and characterization is fantastic. The art style still fits the material very well, of course. I loved how information about Maria Hill's past yields a picture of her as a more complex character, and informs my sense of why she feels the way she does about many thing, including how information about her father fits into her attitudes about the superheroic world.

All of the above ensures this is worth at least four stars, even by my rather exacting standards for a four-star tale. The weaknesses of it include the arc's resolution hitting a bit less hard than I expected, and the personal life subplots just sorta falling into place with a bit less tension than might be ideal. Some of the personal life material happened so easily and abruptly that I thought I was looking at a dream sequence at first. Despite the depth of shading added to the mental picture of Maria hill, she was not rendered sympathetically enough for me to feel the full impact of the resolution the way I might have liked, and the fact of her problems becoming clear exists at enough of a remove from Jessica that my sympathy for that protagonist does not lend enough weight to make up for the lack of deeper sympathy for Maria. None of this is enough to drag my rating down from four stars, though.

The denouement raises a bit of a cliffhanger revelation that promises horrors to come and, whether it is what it seems or not, I look forward to reading the next volume.
( )

Private investigator Jessica Jones reluctantly takes the case of a fairly despicable spy/agent who is now being hunted down by forces unknown. Jones is hard-boiled and angsty. The comic tries to add a gritty private detective vibe to superhero land and it does so by including shady S.H.I.E.L.D. agents with grey motivations instead of superheroes. The grittiness is achieved by *removing* the superheroes. Of course Jessica Jones has some superpowers too, which she seems embarrassed by but which allow her to survive some serious punishments. ( )