Endings & Beginnings: The Fifth Diary

July 11, 2011
At the start of this disappointing thriller from Benson (Evil Hours), 48-year-old Martin Talbot learns from a confessional letter that his 72-year-old, Alzheimer's-afflicted mother, Judy, wrote years earlier that she was the Black Stiletto, "ne of the most famous people on the planet," a costumed vigilante who began to operate in New York City in 1958. Extracts from Judy's diary tell her story. When puberty hits, Judy Cooper finds she has superhuman vision and hearing as well as an "intuition" that can tell her whether a person is good or bad. After being sexually abused by her stepfather, she flees her Texas home for the Big Apple, where she finds someone willing to teach her boxing. When the gangster she falls for is killed, Judy, inspired by reading a Batman comic, adopts the persona of the costumed hero to take on the mob. Fans of Alan Moore's work incorporating superheroes into a realistic world will find this similar effort doesn't measure up.

October 15, 2014
Iconic vigilante Black Stiletto, the alter ego of 25-year-old Judy Cooper, faces challenges in 1962. Her reputation is being besmirched by a copycat who's committing robbery and murder, so the LAPD is after her, and the Mob has a price on her head. Then she discovers she's pregnant. All this is revealed in the present day to her son, middle-age accountant Martin Talbot, as he reads the fifth and last of his mother's diaries while she nears death in a suburban Chicago nursing home. The pregnant Black Stiletto is shot breaking up a Mob counterfeit ring before her condition curtails her crime fighting; she then takes measures to protect her newborn son and her privacy. But more than 50 years later, there still are vengeful parties threatening not only Judy but also Martin, his fianc'e, and his daughter, Gina, who clearly has her grandmother's genes. Benson wraps up this five-book series in grand style with a satisfying climax, but as the title and final pages suggest, this may not be the end of the Black Stiletto. Escapist entertainment tinged with melancholy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)