Secrets & Lies: The Fourth 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.

January 1, 2014

Fleshing out a real-live action hero (Judy Talbot is actually the Black Stiletto), Benson keeps Judy's son and granddaughter hopping as they battle modern crime and search for details about The Black Stiletto's adventures in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, circa 1961 (after The Black Stiletto: Stars & Stripes).

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November 11, 2013
Judy Cooper (aka the Black Stiletto) meets Leo Kelly, a suave ladies’ man in New York City, who persuades her to relocate to Los Angeles, in Benson’s appealing fourth novel featuring the masked vigilante (after 2013’s The Black Stiletto: Stars and Stripes). The LAPD proves more willing than the NYPD to accept unconventional allies like Judy, but disillusionment comes in the form of two gradual epiphanies: Leo not only is incapable of making the commitment Judy yearns for but is also a ruthless criminal, the Black Stiletto’s natural prey. Judy is canny and skilled enough to stay alive while tackling gun-wielding thugs, though she is armed with only a knife, but she’s not insightful enough to realize that she’s once again dating the villain. Reminiscent of heroes from the Golden Age of comics like the Black Canary and Lady Luck, thrill-seeking Judy makes an endearing protagonist. Agent: Peter Miller, Global Lion.

January 1, 2014
Desire for revenge lives on for decades, threatening middle-age accountant Martin Talbot as it threatened his mother, Judy, the internationally known vigilante called the Black Stiletto, in the early 1960s. With Judy now in the final stages of Alzheimer's disease, Martin is reading his mother's diaries and reveals the secret of her crime-fighting alter ego to his daughter, Gina, a budding expert in the self-defense system Krav Maga. In alternating chapters from 1961 and the present, Judy leaves New York when the Black Stiletto becomes a prime target of the NYPD, landing in L.A., where she's smitten with charismatic mobster Leo Kelly, who hides his work from her. As Kelly advances in his hierarchy, the Mob wants the Black Stiletto's head for helping the district attorney. This fourth entry in the Black Stiletto series is darker than earlier ones, given the escalating violence in both past and present story lines. But it's no less entertaining, as fast-paced action leads to a cliff-hanger; closure is likely in the next entry, and there's potential for a spin-off. Addictive escapism.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)