Deadly Vows wasn’t originally going to be called Deadly Vows.
When I decided that DCM would evolve into a series, I began writing the sequel immediately at the close of Deadly College Murders, eagerly plotting the next twists and characters.
While still writing Deadly College Murders within that five-year span, the sequel’s title wasn’t always fixed as Deadly Vows: Echoes of College Crimes (IIBA Winner April 2026); at first it had been planned as “Wedding and a Murder: Sequel to Deadly College Murders.”
I realized that the title was too long and originally, the story was going to begin where it had originally ended: New York. So how did I come up with the title of the second book? It all boiled down to the wedding between Connie and her fiancée. I needed a believable reason for Hannah to go back to that godforsaken town she had sworn she would never set foot in again. I knew that if I wanted the continuation of the first book, I would need to focus on the murder of Connie and all the tangled secrets that had shadowed her life.
When Hannah speaks with Connie shortly before the tragedy, she senses that Connie is holding back and concealing something important, but she chooses to dismiss the unease and carry on. Mere moments before Hannah would reach the altar, Connie is suddenly murdered, her life taken before she can utter the words “I do.”
After her murder, Hannah tells Rafael that she suspects whoever killed Connie had to be someone tied to her past in college—the same college she attended and later returned to as a professor. The echoes of Connie’s life on that campus, the secrets she kept, and the investigation she was pursuing into King X all point to connections rooted in those earlier years.
Once I had that written, it was how I arrived at the title Deadly Vows: Echoes of College Crimes.
But it wasn’t going to be about Connie’s murder either; this time it would revolve around Hannah’s sudden memory loss and the consuming obsession to uncover who Sofia really was. When Hannah is later cornered by the culprit and savagely beaten into a coma, the unraveling becomes even more urgent; it will fall to Rafael to dig through lies and danger to discover who King X truly is and, ultimately, to piece together the real identity and hidden past of Connie.
As with the first book, the reader MUST pay close attention to each and every one of the suspicious characters, for each of them conceals a fragment that will unlock Hannah’s memory.
