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Description
Being young, gifted, and black at Harvard has never been easy. For Ella Fisher, outspoken and controversial Dean of Students at Harvard Law School, it was murder.
After Nikki Chase -- a smart, ambitious, attractive black economics professor -- stumbles over her friend Ella's body during a blackout in a classroom building, she finds herself plunged into the investigation of her death. In the process she uncovers some of Harvard's most deeply buried secrets.
Nikki learns that plenty of people could have wanted Ella dead. There's the debonair -- and married -- new Harvard president Leo Barrett. Many thought Leo and Ella were lovers, and now he's looking awfully guilty. The Chairman of the Economics Department suddenly, suspiciously, has a lot of money. And Ella's radical, Afrocentric ex-husband had apparently been blackmailing her.
With the help of Ella's two true friends, Nikki sets out to unravel the mystery -- and the complications of her own love life. Proving that love can be murder, she drives toward the shocking conclusion that will turn all of Harvard on its ear.
In her debut outing as a mystery novelist, Pamela Thomas-Graham introduces the world to a delightful and exciting amateur female detective, Nikki Chase. At 30, Nikki has already eschewed a career on Wall Street to become a professor of economics at Harvard, her alma mater. She is brilliant, beautiful, ambitious, and black--a characteristic Thomas-Graham makes clear from the get-go. "Being young and black at Harvard requires advanced survival skills," she writes. "Seven generations of us have found it exhilarating, perplexing, difficult, and dangerous. For Rosezella Maynette Fisher, it was murder."
When Rosezella, Harvard's most powerful black woman and Nikki's good friend, dies mysteriously on the eve of a new school year, Nikki finds herself compelled to track down all the clues leading to the killer. A cast of richly drawn and complex characters helps and hinders her quest. For advice, she turns occasionally to Raphael Griffin, a cop who has traded the bougainvillea of the British Virgin Islands for the ivy of Harvard Yard. For moral support, she turns to Maggie Daily, a teacher, landlady, and poet whose rich stories and rolling tones provide the book with texture, history, and charm. Like any other good woman detective, Nikki has a love life as perplexing as the mystery to be solved. Her long-lost ex-boyfriend, Dante Rosario, returns to town, bringing with him more sizzle and spark than Nikki is prepared to handle.
Though it's not as dark and creepy as Paullina Simons's 1996 campus-based mysteryThe Red Leaves, A Darker Shade of Crimson captures all the power, tradition, and atmosphere of the Ivy League campus. And while Thomas-Graham does explore the social and political issues surrounding race at Harvard, she manages to avoid the pitfalls of turning a well-crafted mystery into a polemic. --L.A. Smith
