The Black Stiletto: Stars & Stripes: A Novel
Keeping a well-guarded family secret—his mother, Judy Cooper Talbot, was the Black Stiletto vigilante, a legend in decades past—is becoming increasingly burdensome for divorced middle-age accountant Martin Talbot. With his mother stricken with dementia and living in a nursing home, Martin feels increasing pressure to reveal her background as he falls for one of her doctors, Maggie McDaniel, and ponders how to the explain scars and traces of gunshot wounds on his mother’s body. Meanwhile, he reads his mother’s diary from 1960, in which Judy, in her early 20s, has a run-in with Chinese tongs in New York, learns the Chinese martial art wushu, works as a volunteer in John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and becomes entangled in a Russian assassination plot. While Martin worries about his mother’s declining health and his daughter, Gina’s, behavior (echoing her grandmother’s?), he regrets not questioning his origins earlier. In the third entry in this series, real-life concerns contrast with the comic book–like escapism of the Black Stiletto’s adventures of 50-plus years past, all likely to heighten anticipation for the next two series entries, promised for 2014. --Michele Leber