Tattooed to Death

November 2, 2020
At the outset of Redmond’s fast, fun sequel to 2020’s Journaled to Death featuring vlogger Mandy Meadows, a barista at the University of Seattle Hospital coffee bar, nurse Reese O’Leary-Sett, Mandy’s friend and fellow vlogger, huffs into the bar proclaiming that she could kill the hospital’s new massage therapist, Coral Le Charme (“Worst massage ever,” she says). A few hours later, Mandy finds Coral’s body in the hospital parking lot—on her stomach is a series of black bullseye tattoos. Reese soon lands in jail, and Mandy resolves to find the true culprit. Dysfunctional families, dodgy meditation gurus, and a potential stalker stud the plot with potential motives and suspects. Meanwhile, Mandy deals with her child support-dodging ex-husband, her blossoming attraction to the handsome homicide cop who rents her basement apartment, and the fact that her 15-year-old daughter is growing up. Redmond strikes a good balance between Mandy’s crime solving and personal life. Readers will look forward to spending more time with this resourceful heroine. Agent: Agent: Laurie McLean, Fuse Literary.

October 15, 2020
A second round of mildly murderous intrigue for University of Seattle Hospital barista/vlogger Mandy Meadows and her friends and relations. For better or worse, Reese O'Leary-Sett, the Irish Bengali nurse who's Mandy's neighbor and fellow vlogger, has precious little chance to execrate the terrible chair massage she received from therapist Coral Le Charme before Mandy finds the perpetrator stabbed to death next to a dumpster in the hospital's parking garage. Since Coral's husband, Tom DeRoy, is a bladesmith who's rumored to have beaten her, he's the obvious suspect. To Mandy's distress, however, her lodger, Seattle homicide detective Justin Ahola, passes over Tom and arrests Reese, who after all really did complain about that massage. The stage would be set for Mandy to move into full sleuthing mode if her plate weren't already full. Her enduringly immature ex-husband's failure to pay child support has forced her to work two jobs, and a year after her divorce became final, she suddenly finds herself subject to romantic advances from three unlikely men, none of them welcome, while Vellum, her 15-year-old daughter and partner in teaching clients to document their lives in online journals, is pursued by a suitor Mandy finds downright creepy. Unsavory secrets do eventually come to light, but Mandy's entirely too busy with other matters to unearth them herself, and Redmond is clearly more invested in subjecting her heroine to amatory advances than developing her detective chops. Nice enough, but the heroine is both seriously overworked and not up to much.

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