Ellie is a crabby old woman who cleans graffiti off local mailboxes. When she meets Sarah, a black-haired teenager in Goth garb and makeup, neither imagines that they will join forces to stop a psychopathic killer of homeless young people in the neighborhood park and forest. From the moment Sarah sees her dead friend Peter’s athletic shoe poking out from a pile of curbside leaves as she helps Ellie wipe off mailbox graffiti, she knows an insane man disguised as a pirate is looking for her. Ellie receives a threatening phone call and understands someone’s out to get her too, probably the same pirate. Concern for the kids this killer calls his family leads Sarah, frightened, alone, through the trackless woods to a hidden camp in the county forest where eight scared runaways huddle around a sparking campfire. A few days later, concern for Sarah takes Ellie, armed with a butcher knife, to the same camp. Graffiti Grandma, is told through the eyes of Ellie, Sarah, a cop named Matt, and a man who calls himself Starkey, and the histories of these characters, their loves and losses, are vital in the frantic search for a killer who targets teenagers living on the streets of two Northwest towns. This gritty, shocking path leads them to a murderer with blood on his hands, a gold ring in his ear, and a note from his long-lost mother.With fear as a backdrop, the unlikely relationship of Sarah and Ellie matures into acceptance, then into friendship, and then into even more as each discovers she needs a family to replace the one she lost.Along with the shocking look into the lives of homeless teenagers and the sad beginnings of a serial killer, Graffiti Grandma carries an important message for it readers: Family is the engine that drives our lives, whether it’s the one we find ourselves in or the one we seek.
