By Dennis Fischman

Some readers of mysteries will pick up any book with a murder to be solved (or even a burglar to be found and forced to fork over!). Other readers find themselves drawn to a particular subgenre of mystery: the cozy, the noir, the hard-boiled detective, the murder cabin, the police procedural, or the thriller.

I read all types, but usually a pure thriller doesn’t thrill me. I’m less interested in chase scenes or hairbreadth escapes from death than I am in the process of investigation … and the secrets it uncovers in people’s lives.

The nice thing about Trouble in Queenstown is that it combines a good private detective character with a thriller plot. You get to know and care about the character, follow her logic, and see her out of danger before all is done.

Trouble in Queenstown, by Delia Pitts
Minotaur Books, 2024

Vandy Myrick is a private investigator in a small town in New Jersey, returned home after tragedy ends her previous life as a wife and mother. So, she now lives among people she grew up with. Not only her father Evander (a Black retired cop suffering from dementia. now living in a memory care hospital), but also: the man who mostly attends Evander in the memory care unit, the Queenstown Chief of Police, her pharmacist, her bartender, the lesbian couple who are her partners at her agency, and a set of racist thugs who used to be on the football team but now work security for Mayor Josephine Hannah.

The mayor’s nephew, Leo, comes to Vandy ostensibly to protect his wife, whom he fears is being threatened by a stalker. All is not as it seems, however. It becomes clear Leo thinks his wife, Ivy, is cheating on him and possibly about to leave him. Then, she turns up dead in their home, along with a man (Hector Ramirez) that she’s met doing volunteer work. And Leo is there.

Did Hector kill Ivy and Leo killed him in self-defense? That’s what the town wants to conclude: case closed. Did Leo kill both of them, out of jealousy or for any other reason? That’s what Ivy’s dad hires Vandy to find out. And that’s what Hector’s teenage daughter thinks, too.

Or is something else going on, something that means neither Hector nor Leo are the real killers and the motive lies deep in the past? Vandy has gotten in over her head. Will she come out alive?

If you’re in the mood for a dark thriller, with political intrigue and family secrets, set in a small town, this is the book for you. You will get as bonuses a smart woman PI with a complicated family and a vivid sense of the rural New Jersey landscape, hauntingly described.

You will also absorb some insights into the way being a Black woman in a predominantly white community gives our heroine perspectives that her white neighbors lack. (I haven’t enjoyed a Black detective so much since Blanche on the Lam.)

I’m looking forward to reading #2 in the series, which was just recently published, and perhaps the author’s previous series, the Ross Agency Mysteries, too.