Club Calvi spotlights the 2nd book in the private eye "Vandy Myrick Mystery" series set in N.J.
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The author of a 2024 Club Calvi FicPick is back with a follow-up book that reviewers are calling "an absorbing whodunit" and a "twisting mystery."
Delia Pitts kicked off her "Vandy Myrick Mysteries" with "Trouble in Queenstown." Her new book "Death of an Ex" is being released on July 15th.
Vandy Myrick is her hometown's only Black woman private investigator. Pitts told CBS News New York's Mary Calvi that she knew she would write this sequel as she was writing the first book.
"I knew I wanted to include issues about Vandy's past life and I wanted to get into a little bit more detail. I thought the best way to do it is to look at her ex-husband," Pitts said.
Pitts says her cousin in Chicago is the inspiration for Myrick.
"She, back in the '70s, formed with her husband a small security agency. She was a private eye in a narrower sense. And I'm sure her security agency did not deal with murders or kidnappings or any of the dire things that I put [Vandy] through," said Pitts.
Pitts lives in New Jersey. The Vandy Myrick mysteries are set in a place called Queenstown, New Jersey. Pitts says it's close to, but not exactly, her hometown.
"I live in central New Jersey, in Hightstown" Pitts told Calvi. "Though there are no murders that I know of in Hightstown, the real Hightstown. But the diversity and complexity that I saw in my hometown, I wanted to bring into this book."
Pitts has a doctorate in African history and was an administrator at Rutgers University before she started writing fiction.
"I've been writing all my life in one way or another," she said. "But once I left academia, I got to focus full time on my fiction writing. I did some independent publishing, self publishing, before I got into this series. I've always loved film noir. I've always loved detective stories. It seemed a natural for me to go and try to write my own."
Pitts says Myrick will be back, as she's now writing the third book in the series.
You can read an excerpt, and purchase the book, below.
The CBS New York Book Club focuses on books connected to the Tri-State Area in their plots and/or authors. The books may contain adult themes.
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"Death of an Ex" by Delia Pitts
From the publisher:
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 from 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 roles: parent, husband, businessman, philanthropist. But which role got him killed?
Delia Pitts Lives in New Jersey.
"Death of an Ex" by Delia Pitts (ThriftBooks) $22
Excerpt: "Death of an Ex" by Delia Pitts
Chapter 2
The rain subsided before I parked my Jeep at the graveyard's black iron gate. The entrance to Bethel Cemetery was a spindly structure, fragile spikes dividing the uneven path from the sidewalk. Now, bars of late October sun slanted through the fence, shedding stripes of brass and copper on the lawns and gravestones.
The Flats was the Black section of Q-Town, and Bethel Cemetery, five blocks from my childhood home, was the pride of our neighborhood. The gold-and-red canopy of oak trees, the curving paths, fat squirrels, and brazen deer made the park seem like an enchanted empire when I was young. Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church was my mother's favorite retreat. My father, also Evander Myrick, never attended with us, which diminished Bethel's value in my eyes. My father claimed my Saturdays for baseball or football games, museum visits, and chess tournaments. Now retired after twenty-seven years on the Queenstown police force, Evander lived in a nursing home. He was the robust, cheerful, and eternally oblivious victim of advanced Alzheimer's.
I stepped onto the cement track winding through the cemetery. Water glinted like lost coins in the chips and crevices of the path. My family's graves occupied a plot of balding turf in the northeast quadrant of the cemetery. As I dawdled, I studied the older graves, flattened mounds barely discernible in the grass, their headstones buffed smooth by decades of caresses.
When I reached my goal, I sat on a stone bench beneath an oak tree before the double-wide family plot. Splashes of sun turned the marble headstone from gray to ocean white; chiseled script announced the precious names below the square blocks forming our shared plot:
MYRICK
ALMA MARIE, LOVING WIFE DEVOTED MOTHER
MONICA ALMA, BELOVED DAUGHTER
I pictured them lying side by side, arms entwined, my daughter resting her head on my mother's breast. Alma smoothing Monica's fuzzy hairline the way she used to stroke mine. The dimple flashing in my baby's cheek as my mother's hand flexed. I knew Monica's entire life from lonely beginning to ugly end. But I wished I'd known more of my mother's life. Her drives and desires, her creations and conquests. As a certified daddy's girl, I'd never tried to know my mother. This visit to her grave made me want to learn about that Alma. The one I'd ignored for so many decades. Now, before our time burned to cinders.
"I've been away too long," I whispered. Settling elbows on knees, I spoke louder. "But I've been thinking about you. Always." I meant them both, but Monica most of all. I touched a thin gold chain around my throat. I adjusted the dangling letter M so it nestled within the notch of my collarbone. Monica's necklace, now mine. Inheritance inverted.
As often happened, visiting Monica here summoned thoughts of her father. My ex-husband, Philip Bolden, had quit me before our baby was born. Did he ever visit her grave? Did Phil even mourn her loss? Was I gone from his life and forgotten, too? Reconstructing our split, I felt the decision was all mine. Philandering Phil was more than a catchy nickname for an ex. But sometimes I worried he'd wanted the divorce just as much as I did. Where did that balance teeter in my heart? That tilt between pride and desire that kept Phil's image scratching at my memories even twenty years after the death of our marriage.
I tugged from my coat pocket a folded white envelope. Shaking it helped scatter unruly thoughts of Phil. I read the return address out loud. "That's the name of the fraternity, Mama. And Monica, that's their national headquarters."
I pulled out the crumpled stub and ran a finger along the edge where the check had hung. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I tried the "two," but didn't get further. I wouldn't recite the numbers out loud. No point. Alma and Monica already knew. Overhead, a squirrel scolded. I looked up at the orange quilt of leaves when he repeated the chatter. Of course, they knew the fraternity had paid me two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to forget Monica had drowned in her own vomit on a chintz-covered sofa in the parlor at a party in the campus house they owned. The fraternity bought a quarter million dollars of my forgetfulness. Blood money settled on my blood kin. I felt filthy. Dirty and rich.
I stood from the bench. "I can do this much." The squirrel yipped in reply, but I was talking to my family. "Not enough. But I'll make this money mean something. Watch me." I clawed a hole in the bare soil on Monica's side of the grave.
From the back pocket of my jeans I pulled the green Bic lighter, then knelt. The lighter's flame leaped to the stub in my hand. When it was well torched, I dropped the sheet into the hole. As fire consumed the papers, wind caught a plume of smoke, carrying its gray feathers toward the church.
After the fire guttered, I patted dirt into a mound over the ashes. The scent of burnt paper drifted around my head as I walked to the car.
When I reached the end of the path, I saw a Black woman standing at the gate. Her posture was stiff, like a sentry. She wore a navy blue pantsuit, her fists buried in the lapels to pull the jacket tight across her chest. No coat or gloves, a fuchsia blouse buttoned to her throat, as if she'd run from inside the church to intercept me.
I hitched my shoulders, then offered a semi-cringe. I had every right to visit the cemetery; but still I felt like an invader. The woman said, "You shouldn't start fires here, you know." She cinched her lips. When I didn't reply she added, "Any spark could set off the grass."
"It was a small one." I thinned my voice. "I smothered it before I left."
She raised her eyes to the sky, as if she could see smoke scrawled on the clouds. Then she looked straight to my face. "I know you." Thrust lip, no smile. "You're a Myrick, right?"
Nailed, but how did this newcomer know my business?
From "Death of an Ex" by Delia Pitts. Copyright (c) 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission of Minotaur Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Publishing Group.
