Jackie has owned her salon on Henderson Avenue for seventeen years. She knows her clients the way good stylists know everyone: what they say, what they mean, what they’re not saying, and what they’ve been doing at home to their hair that they’ll pretend they haven’t. She is precise, professional, and invisible in the way that service workers are invisible. Present for everything, noticed by no one.
Content Warning: This book contains violence, death, and dark humor involving crime. Intended for adult readers.
Keisha delivers the mail. She knows the route better than some people know their own addresses. She knows who files complaints with the HOA, who leaves packages on the porch too long, who waves and who doesn’t, and who has exactly the kind of personality that makes a person easy to dislike and difficult to mourn.
When an argument over an eighty-seven-dollar dinner ends with a client in the chair and Japanese shears moving at the wrong angle, Jackie does what she has always done: she calls Keisha. And Keisha does what she has always done: she shows up with rubber gloves and the expression of someone who is going to manage a situation rather than argue about it.
Killer Cuts & Dead Letters is a dark comedy set in South Florida about two working women whose professional skills, built over years of managing difficult people in tight quarters, turn out to be exactly the skills required for everything that follows. Jackie handles evidence the way she handles color correction: methodically, with attention to what other people miss. Keisha handles logistics the way she handles her route: efficiently, without drawing attention, because no one looks twice at the mail carrier.
FBI Special Agent Raymond Burrell is building a case. He is thorough, experienced, and working from a profile that makes complete sense. A male perpetrator, a discernible pattern, victims connected by something he hasn’t quite identified yet. He is, in most respects, correct. He is also looking in entirely the wrong direction.
What follows is a novel about competence and invisibility, about the kind of people who keep everything running and are therefore never considered capable of anything else. It is also, quietly, very funny.
| ISBN (Paperback): | 978-1-972810-53-8 |
| ISBN (eBook): | 978-1-972810-54-5 |
| Publisher: | The Writing King |
| Publication Date: | April 20, 2026 |
| Print Length: | 384 pages |
| Language: | English |
Questions
What kind of book is this?
A dark comedy crime novel. It’s funny in the way that competent people handling an impossible situation efficiently is funny. Not slapstick. Not cozy. Something closer to a very dry workplace comedy that happens to involve a body. Readers who liked Tana French’s Dublin murder novels or the BBC series Killing Eve — but wanted more mordant humor and less glamour — will find familiar territory.
Is the FBI agent the main character?
No. The book alternates between Jackie and Keisha, with Raymond Burrell’s chapters providing the investigative side of the story. He’s a capable, thorough investigator working from a completely logical profile. The comedy comes from how thoroughly his logic excludes the two people sitting directly in front of it.
How dark is it?
There’s violence — the inciting event happens in Chapter Two and is not glossed over. But the book’s tone from there is more procedural than gory. The darkness is in the situation and the logic the characters bring to it, not in sustained graphic content. If you can read a crime novel without looking away, you can read this one.
Is this part of a series?
Standalone novel. The story resolves completely.
Read the Opening
Chapter One
Mrs. Carver
It was a Saturday in March. Mrs. Carver came in at two with the Pinterest photo ready before she’d even sat down.
Same photo as the last three times: an Instagram influencer with warm blonde waves, layered and dimensional. The kind of color that required significant work and patience to build on hair that had been box-dyed for fifteen years. Jackie looked at the photo. She looked at Mrs. Carver’s hair. She made her assessment.
She did not say what the photo would require. Mrs. Carver knew what it would require. She came back every eight weeks anyway, which was the implicit agreement between them and had been for six years.
“He doesn’t understand maintenance,” Mrs. Carver said.
“Most people don’t,” Jackie said.
“He thinks I should go shorter. He’s been saying it for three years.”
“What do you think?”
“I think I’ve been working on something for six years and I’m not going shorter until it’s done.”
She tipped eleven percent. Always. Jackie had thought about that eleven percent many times without being able to determine whether it was ignorance or principle. Either way it was eleven.
“Same time in eight weeks?” Mrs. Carver said, at the door.
“Same time,” Jackie said.
She watched her go down Henderson Avenue. Mrs. Carver was wearing a blue jacket that was wrong for the weather but right for the color of her hair, which was coming right at last.
She would come back in eight weeks.
She would not.
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× Chapter Two
Eighty-Seven Dollars
The argument started over a restaurant.
Keisha had been waiting at the restaurant since six. Jackie had the last appointment of the day at six-thirty — a root touch-up that should have been forty-five minutes and had become ninety because the client’s roots were at a different stage than documented, because the client had been doing something at home she hadn’t mentioned, and because Jackie had failed to notice until she had already committed to the toner.
At seven-fifteen she picked up her phone without looking at the caller.
“Where you at?” Keisha’s voice came through over restaurant noise.
“Working.”
“It’s seven-fifteen, Jackie.”
“I know what time it is.”
“Then you know I’ve been sitting here for over an hour, and I ordered you your usual because I thought—”
“I’m in the middle of a color process. You know I can’t leave a color process.”
“You have thumbs. Working people with thumbs communicate.”
“Eighty-seven dollars,” Keisha said. “I ate alone. I told the waiter you were coming. He stopped asking.”
Jackie’s arm came up. She was gesturing, the gesture she made when she was making a point about something, the broad sweep that went with words like I’m just saying. She had been making this gesture since she was nine years old. She was making it with her hand.
She was making it with her hand that was holding the shears.
Professional shears. Japanese steel. Eight-inch blades, razor-sharp, which was the only kind of sharp Jackie kept in her salon because she had learned seventeen years ago that a dull blade was a dangerous one.
She was not thinking about the shears. She was thinking about eighty-seven dollars.
The arc of the gesture was too wide. The blade caught Mrs. Carver across the throat in one clean motion that Jackie’s hands did not feel as anything except a continuation of the gesture.
The sound was very small. Almost nothing at all.
Then the sound of the phone hitting the floor. Then the blood.
Keisha arrived forty-seven minutes later. She had a key from six years of standing appointments. She let herself in the front and stood in the doorway for approximately three seconds, during which time she took in the entirety of the situation without saying anything. Then she said:
“Where are the contractor bags.”
“Storage room, second shelf.”
Keisha went to the storage room.
“The camera,” Jackie said. “Above the door.”
Keisha looked at the camera. She looked at the second camera above the register. “Do you know how to delete it?”
“No.”
“Do you know anyone who does?”
“I have a card. A camera guy. He does small businesses.”
“Call him.”
“It’s ten-thirty at night.”
“Call him and say there’s an emergency and you’ll pay him whatever he asks.”
— Continue reading —
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