Review: "Death of an Ex" by Delia Pitts

Death of an Ex by Delia Pitts Minotaur Books, 2025     Death of an Ex, which is Delia Pitts’s second Vandy Myrick mystery, is a thoughtful, deliberately paced private eye novel with a rich New Jersey setting and a heaping of emotional healing. A former Rutgers University cop, the middle-aged Vandy moved back to her small hometown of Queenstown and took a job as a lawyer’s “pet private investigator.” Her boss, Elissa Adesanya, is also Vandy’s best friend and the work tends to be low market rackets like divorce, insurance fraud, and process serving. Vandy is thrown into the deep end of the investigative pool after attending a glitzy event at the high-end Rome School—a private boarding school in Queenstown—where her young friend, Ingrid Ramirez, is receiving an award. Vandy’s ex-husband, Philip Bolden, which is a great surname for any character, is at the reception and even after twenty years he still makes Vandy’s pulse rise and her knees weak. A few days later Vandy takes Philip to her bed and for a moment she doesn’t mind being the other woman. That changes when Philip is gunned down a few blocks from Vandy’s apartment and Vandy is left to figure out who did it and why. All while traversing the mine field of Philip’s personal life—he was married with a teenage son and his wandering libido caused nothing but trouble. While also hoping to keep her and Philip’s indiscretion a secret. Death of an Ex, while rightfully a private eye tale, has the atmosphere of an amateur sleuth in a particularly well-done cozy. Vandy’s investigative style is circular and primarily based on emotion rather than the linear style most often used in detective tales. She bumps around the primary suspects, as sneakily as an English Village sleuth, looking for motive and opportunity. A wobbly tactic because of its use of repetition—a repetition of Vandy’s emotions and a repetition of questioning the same suspects over and over—to deepen the mystery, but one that ultimately works since it reveals the illogic and tragedy of murder. But the true charm of Death of an Ex is Vandy’s own struggle with the death of her only child and Pitts’s vivid rendering of a predominately Black New Jersey town.

Check out Death of an Ex on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.