Amazon.com Review
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
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
First-novelist Thomas-Graham partly delivers on the promise of this first tale in the projected Ivy League Mystery series by putting her own spin on the academic mystery. Dead is Rosezella Fisher, a smart, politically astute African American woman who had earned some enemies in her diligent climb to the position of dean of students at Harvard Law School. After Ella falls down a flight of steps to her death, Nikki Chase, a younger, black assistant professor in Harvard's economics department and narrator of the story, suspects murder. Thomas-Graham skillfully incorporates attitudes toward race and integration into the story, contrasting older African Americans formed by the civil rights movement to younger middle-class blacks who take for granted the movement's achievements. Less successful are the story's plot and characterizations. Events proceed from a MacGuffin that has a stranglehold on the story: Nikki worked with Ella on a committee examining university finances and must locate two of the dead woman's computer disks. Thomas-Graham manipulates mainly wooden characters who personify the academic power structure, and many of the personal relationships are childish, especially Nikki's sophomoric behavior with ex-lover Dante Rosario. In the end, despite the intellectual setting, the murder turns out not to have been a crime of reason. (Apr.) FYI: Thomas-Graham is the first black woman partner at a large management consultant firm in New York City.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
