Día de los Muertos Is About Remembering the Dead

Some Debts Can Only Be Paid in Blood

Most people celebrate the Day of the Dead by building altars, scattering marigold petals, sharing food, and remembering the people they’ve lost.

It’s a time for honouring those who came before us.

For keeping their memories alive.

For celebrating the lives they lived rather than letting death have the final word.

In Mexico City, the streets fill with colour, music, and elaborate celebrations. Death might be invited to the party, but so is life.

It’s a beautiful tradition.

And in Shattered Little Sugar Skull, Marin Cross has a rather different reason for thinking about the dead.

She isn’t building an altar.

She’s preparing a killer’s last rites.

Some Debts Are Personal

Marin has never been particularly sentimental about her work. An assignment comes in, a target gets identified, and someone eventually discovers that being on Jane Allen’s list is a spectacularly bad career choice.

But this job is different.

Vera is dead. Her tortured body was displayed on an altar. And the man responsible has left behind a clue that reaches straight into Marin’s past: a card stamped with the name Noir.

The same Noir Marin already put in the ground.

Someone has dragged an old ghost back into the light, and Vera has paid the price.

Marin takes that personally.

There are plenty of reasons to kill someone in her line of work. Some are professional. Some are practical. Some involve a target who mistakes a long history of getting away with murder for proof of immortality.

But this one is about a friend.

And Marin intends to make the person responsible understand exactly what that costs.

Jane Doesn’t Send Flowers

When Jane sends help, she doesn’t exactly choose the conventional option.

Enter Father Rafael Vázquez.

He’s a priest with a taste for last rites and retribution, and an apparent preference for the Old Testament over absolution. He’s hardly the sort of clergyman you’d expect to find accompanying a professional assassin through a city-wide celebration of the dead.

Then again, Jane has never been particularly interested in conventional solutions.

Rafael brings his own perspective to a job that has already become deeply personal for Marin. Together, they must navigate the chaos of the Day of the Dead parade while hunting a man who has managed to turn an old connection into a new nightmare.

Marin brings the blades.

Rafael brings the rosaries.

And between them, the target is about to discover that divine forgiveness and earthly consequences are two very different things.

Some People Deserve Their Last Rites

Día de los Muertos reminds us that the dead remain part of our lives through memory, tradition, and the stories we continue to tell about them.

Shattered Little Sugar Skull takes that idea into darker territory.

Because remembering the dead doesn’t mean forgiving the people who killed them. And honouring a lost friend doesn’t always mean lighting a candle and hoping justice finds its way.

Sometimes justice needs a little help.

Sometimes it needs a very determined woman, a priest with questionable ideas about mercy, and a target who has badly underestimated the consequences of crossing Jane’s people.

If you like your thrillers ruthless, personal, and laced with dark humour…if you enjoy dangerous women, complicated pasts, blades and rosaries, and villains who discover that vengeance has excellent aim…

This one’s for you.

Shattered Little Sugar Skull is available now!

Because the dead deserve to be remembered.

And the people who put them there deserve to answer for it.