TROUBLE IN QUEENSTOWN, first Vandy Myrick mystery from Delia Pitts via Minotaur Books

TROUBLE IN QUEENSTOWN
DELIA PITTS
Minotaur Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: With Trouble in Queenstown, Delia Pitts introduces private investigator Vandy Myrick in a powerful mystery that blends grief, class, race, and family with thrilling results.

Evander “Vandy” Myrick became a cop to fulfill her father’s expectations. After her world cratered, she became a private eye to satisfy her own. Now she's back in Queenstown, New Jersey, her childhood home, in search of solace and recovery. It's a small community of nine thousand souls crammed into twelve square miles, fenced by cornfields, warehouses, pharma labs, and tract housing. As a Black woman, privacy is hard to come by in "Q-Town," and worth guarding.

For Vandy, that means working plenty of divorce cases. They’re nasty, lucrative, and fun in an unwholesome way. To keep the cash flowing and expand her local contacts, Vandy agrees to take on a new client, the mayor’s nephew, Leo Hannah. Leo wants Vandy to tail his wife to uncover evidence for a divorce suit.

At first the surveillance job seems routine, but Vandy soon realizes there’s trouble beneath the bland surface of the case when a racially charged murder with connections to the Hannah family rocks Q-Town. Fingers point. Clients appear. Opposition to the inquiry hardens. And Vandy’s sight lines begin to blur as her determination to uncover the truth deepens. She’s a minor league PI with few friends and no resources. Logic pegs her chances of solving the case between slim and hell no. But logic isn’t her strong suit. Vandy won’t back off.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Middle-aged female protagonist with a dementia-addled parent needing care and an aversion to the snares of monogamy plus a healthy libido? Sign me up.

Smart judge of character, possessed of real, professionally gained investigative chops? Intelligent woman who suffers no fools and has a bit too much freedom of tongue? Head of the line.

We Ma'at followers don't get gifts like Vandy all that often. I was delighted by her, by her casually-but-effectively drawn world, and the challenges she faces. They're not tied to her Blackness, they're not tied to her womanness, they're informed by those facts of her life of course but they don't arise from them. Her father in a memory-care facility? Happens to ever more of us as living longer expands the chances of developing some kind of dementia. Coming home to care for her dad is another increasingly common life-event. Needing to find a way to support oneself with the skills of a lifetime yet being inescapably tied to one's family's past is another very common experience to those of us at a certain age (or well past it, but still able to remember the weird double expectations).

The book doesn't pull any punches or give any unrealistic takes on Vandy's relationships with Queenstown's police. They're not orcs out to club her into a pulp; they're not sensitivity-trained good boys, either. They're bog-standard misogynists and racists who do their jobs without much reflection, or much actual malice. They have to solve cases, so they do; that sometimes means corners get cut. That's not okay with Vandy. Her role isn't to teach the cops; it's to catch the guilty and make sure the cops can't ignore her findings.

Why then isn't there a higher star rating? Because some tropes are deployed as shortcuts in the identification of the guilty party that were, shall we say, unsubtly foreshadowed. Klieg lights and klaxons aren't subtle hints. Now, I have read a lot of mysteries and a lot of puzzle-solving ones in that mass. I'm not going to demand authors surprise me to get good marks, because next-to-no one would meet the standard. Not to mention other people don't have my ideas about what counts as a clue, or a trope. So in the case of this story, I rate it four stars because I feel sure y'all will enjoy meeting Vandy, spending time in Queenstown, and seeing how the town works when its social fabric is ripped by the gross insult of murder.

I'm in for the next one. Soon, please, thank you please.