Revenge in a Small Town

Award-winning private investigator Vandy Myrick returns in Delia Pitts's Revenge in a Small Town, where Vandy must solve a case in the past to find out what killed someone in the present.

As Queenstown, New Jersey’s only Black woman private investigator, Vandy Myrick knows that she can’t be choosy when it comes to cases. She’s still building her business after returning to her hometown to start over after losing her daughter. And when it comes to “Q-Town,” Vandy never knows who’s going to want to hire her.

The Bartlett twins want Vandy to save their mother. Merna Bartlett has been bedridden for forty years, after falling down the stairs while working as a maid for a local and powerful family. But recently, Merna’s started talking about the stories she could tell and the people she could settle scores with—and the twins are worried she’s about to be murdered. While Vandy isn’t a bodyguard, and she’s never going to make money on this case, she wants to ease their minds.

But when Vandy shows up to her first day on the job to discover Merna has died, her case changes. The Bartlett twins believe she was killed because of a forty-year-old mystery and they want Vandy to investigate what happened to their mother both now and four decades ago.