THE BLACK STILETTO
Stars & Stripes
By Raymond Benson
Oceanview Publishing
384 pgs.
In this, the third installment of Raymond Benson’s female
vigilante saga, Judy Cooper comes to the aid of a Chinese family in New York,
gets in involved with the 1960 presidential campaign and ends up saving both
John Kennedy and Richard Nixon from being shot by a Russian assassin. All in a
day’s work for the vivacious readhead from Texas.
As in the previous entries, all this is revealed via her
diaries by her son Martin. Judy today is an elderly soul residing in a senior
care facility suffering from Alzeimer’s. Never having revealed her secret
crime-fighting career in the past, the truth revealed in those diaries becomes
an unbearable burden to Martin. At the same time, his only daughter, Gina, has
endured a rape and assault and is now studying martial arts taking her on a
path and eerily mirrors that of her grandmother.
The delight of this series is the humanity Benson infuses in
all his characters and allows each to tell his or her story. All of them begin
to form the picture of a real family, each member in flux doing their best to
make through the greatest puzzle of them all, life. This is such a great series
and here’s hoping we’ll soon be hearing Gina’s voice.
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