Death of an Ex

Vandy Myrick Mysteries Book 2

Delia Pitts

Minotaur Books

July 15^th, 2025

Death of an Ex by Delia Pitts is about family, race, class, and grief. Vandy, the main character, tries to keep busy with work as she still deals with the grief of losing her daughter. 

Early in the story, her ex-husband Phil returns which conjures up all the memories, and they come crashing back to the surface. After a one-night stand with Phil, Vandy is getting ready to go to work when she finds out he has been murdered. She decides to piece together what brought her ex-husband’s life to an end. Was it a complicated marriage, the son who attends a prestigious local school, his business, or his being a philanthropist? It is a puzzling murder that has many twists. Plus, there is the Rome School where Phil’s son goes, and his current wife works.  There are shady deals going on in this private school. Readers wonder if this also plays into Phil’s murder.

Elise Cooper: Idea for the series?

Delia Pitts: The series came out of my long-standing love for film watching, detective stories, and mysteries/suspense of all kinds.  I wanted to write my own and put in a few twists. This series has a black woman PI, Vandy Myrick, within a small-town setting. I made up a town which is very close to the Central New Jersey town I live in. Queenstown is the name of the series town. I wanted to explore what I discovered in my own hometown: diversity, different world backgrounds, and people speaking different languages.

EC: Idea for the story?

DP: I wanted to delve further into Vandy’s past. In the first couple of chapters of the first book, Trouble in Queenstown, I established she had a daughter who died tragically, an ex-husband, Philip Bolden, who she had a rocky, tumultuous, and passionate relationship. I want to make her relationship with her ex-husband the centerpiece of this book. 

EC: What was Monica’s role?

DP: She is Philip and Vandy’s late daughter. Vandy has a wound at the core of the various levels of grief she experiences in this book. Monica was a freshman at Rutgers University. She died of asphyxiation at a fraternity party, having drank too much, and died in her own vomit.  Vandy quit her job as a campus police officer at Rutgers and moved to her hometown of Queenstown where she grew up. Vandy’s world has been destroyed by Monica’s death. 

EC:  How would you explain Philip and Vandy’s relationship?

DP: It is very fraught, messy, with a high point emotionally of her life. When Phil returns, Vandy has her emotions stirred up. She challenged her parents’ judgement after choosing to marry him.  Her father did not like him because he was so slick, and her mother did not trust him.  Vandy decided she could reform the ‘philandering Phil.’ She realized she could not change his approach and character, so she got a divorce.  Now twenty years later he has returned. She sees him still as compelling, charismatic, attractive, and mesmerizing. She finds it hard to resist him.

EC:  Is Vandy a flawed character?

DP: Yes.  She is messy, smart, and has a growing sense of self-awareness.  Because of the loss of Monica, she does not want to make a commitment to a full-blown relationship. She fears she might lose someone.  Her casual attachments are a way of her defending her heart against loss, which she fears.

EC: What about the Rome School?

DP: There are very dicey characters in the Rome School.  It is a plush, private boarding high school located in Queenstown. It is regionally and nationally acclaimed. Everything is not so smooth and shiny as the faculty and administration states.  There is corruption, greed, and unregulated obsession. What influenced the story was the real-life scandal of how celebrities and privileged parents tried to get their children into prestigious colleges. They projected onto their children, in real life and this story, prestige and power. They wanted to make their children follow a path they chose, not what their children would have preferred. This was a foundation for the kind of manipulating power I wanted to explore with the Rome School and its college admissions program.

EC: Next book?

DP: I am working on book three that will come out in the fall 2026.  There is no title. The plot has Vandy involved with the richest people in the town that are covering up their past, but things are getting exposed.

THANK YOU!!

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