DEATH OF AN EX, Vandy Myrick series of Black woman PI mysteries

DEATH OF AN EX
DELIA PITTS (Vandy Myrick #2)
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.00 hardcover, preorder for delivery 15 July 2025

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Delia Pitts expertly writes about family, race, class, and grief in her mysteries. Vandy Myrick captured readers' and critics' hearts in Trouble in Queenstown. She returns in Death of an Ex, where Vandy tries to piece together what brought her ex-husband's life to an end.

Queenstown, New Jersey, feels big when you need help and tiny when you want privacy. For Vandy Myrick, that’s both a blessing and a curse. Now that Vandy’s back in “Q-Town”, her services as her hometown’s only Black woman private investigator have earned her more celebrity—or notoriety—than she figured.

Keeping busy with work helps Vandy deal with the grief of losing her daughter, stitching the seams, cementing the gaps. The memories will always remain, and they come crashing back to the surface when her ex-husband, Phil Bolden, walks back into her life. Promising everything, returning home, restoring family. Until she answers her door to the news that Phil has been murdered. And Vandy decides Phil is now her client.

It’s hard to separate the Phil that Vandy knew with the one Queenstown did. She sees him—and their daughter—in Phil’s son, who attends a prestigious local high school. She sees the layers of a complicated marriage with his wife. She sees all of Phil’s various parent, husband, businessman, philanthropist. But which role got him killed?

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

My Review: Phil was not a nice man. Phil, dead, is now out in front of the world as a not-nice man. Vandy harbors the sentimental fondness for the man she had her only child with, and she also harbors the very very recent memory of the fabulous ex sex they had hours before his murder.

Vandy's new enough in her return to Queenstown (see link above for the first book's review) that the cops, although they must interview her, do so without the usual presumption of guilt such a connection to a fresh murder would bring. Suspicion of her, probing her possible motive, but not a full-on attack on Vandy the person. Since we see the entire proceedings from inside Vandy's head, that felt startling to me. I'd expect to feel very defensive if I was being asked these questions! But Vandy, ex-cop, present-day PI as well as person of interest, sees from a perspective I won't have. And that is why I so enjoy these stories.

Vandy, thinking with her gonads, retains a fondness for the man she impulsively, and disastrously, married long ago. He was and is a skilled lover which clouds her cop-judgment. It doesn't hurt that he fathered her now-dead daughter, and that he's intelligent, articulate, and knows how to say the right thing.

This is the profile of a successful con man, as well...and Vandy's trawling through Phil's life after he left her life lets her know how close to a much bigger disaster than she was in she came. A single mother has hurdles...the wife of a con man has mountains to climb, much like Phil's current wife does. Did she take Justice into her own hands? A slick front with a slippery, dishonest man behind it could make any honest woman mad enough to do the unthinkable...or is she all that honest...? What Phil knew, how he knew it, all the secrets and skulduggery, could be known to her....

Every turn of Vandy's investigation is like that. She has access to the Black community the white police guys don't, and she isn't under the same time pressure to clear the case off the books. Not to mention the fact that the great and the good of Queenstown do not want the dirt Phil knew or the way it connects to them to be revealed. Even if it means some innocent outsider takes the fall for what she did not do.

It's a solidly constructed mystery with fair-play clues and a seriously sharp social conscience. Vandy confronts the prejudices within the racist US system, proving humans will do anything to be able to look down on their fellow humans. Vandy chooses the guilt/innocence dichotomy as her perch. And repeatedly gets knocked off it...proving that Delia C. Potts is a worthy successor to Barbara Neely in the social-realist PI/amateur sleuth genre. If there's a better mystery out in 2025, I haven't found it yet.

So where'd that fifth star go? There are stylistic details I found diminishing my pleasure in the read, like repetitions of revelations and what amount to "when last we met..." chapter summaries. I can, in context, see how these made sense to Author Pitts; I do not like them.

Not enough to skip the next book, though. Soon, please.

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

TROUBLE IN QUEENSTOWN
DELIA PITTS (Vandy Myrick #1)
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.