A Darker Shade of Crimson by Pamela Thomas-Graham

Nikki has discovered the body of Ella Fisher, the outspoken black dean of students, on a staircase in the Littauer building-this after a meeting of the prestigious Crimson Future Committee, to which both women had been appointed. Moving among professors, student leaders, blue-blooded alumni and black activists, Nikki is drawn into a web of adultery, greed, and racial strife in the Gothic dormitories of Yale and the mean streets of New Haven.An impressive first outing introduces Nikki Chase, a young black economics professor at Harvard and a feisty addition to the roster of female amateur sleuths. Soon all of New Haven becomes polarized along racial lines. Further complicating the scenario is the reaction Tyler's arrest draws from the city's black community, as the Reverend Leroy Saunders, a local black minister, seizes the opportunity to gain the spotlight.

She recognizes the possibilities of Tyler's guilt - he does admit to an attraction to the murdered professor - but she also suspects a rush to judgment on the part of the New Haven police. When the police arrest and charge Marcellus Tyler, a black Yale sophomore and football star, who was the last person to have seen Amanda alive, Nikki resists the temptation to relax her investigation of the murder. But when he becomes a suspect in the murder, Nikki finds herself turning detective again. When the body of blond, blue-eyed Amanda Fox, a controversial Yale Law School Professor, is discovered on a deserted street in black inner-city New Haven with multiple stab wounds - and a missing left hand - thirty-year-old Harvard Economics Professor Nikki Chase rushes to the campus to comfort the dead woman's husband, her old friend and mentor Gary Fox. When she responds to his plea, she finds more than she bargained for, as she encounters a brutal murder and explosive racial conflict lurking behind that esteemed institution's ivy-covered stone walls. This time out, Nikki Chase gets a call for help from an old friend who has become a Dean at Yale University and may be in line for the presidency.

Thomas-Graham's previous novel, A Darker Shade of Crimson. Set at Yale, yet once again featuring Harvard Professor Nikki Chase as heroine and sleuth, Blue Blood is sure to please both the fans and reviewers (“…carefully crafted” “…a fast and funny whodunit”, “…a witty, sexy mystery”) who discovered the delights of Ms. Murder returns to the Ivy League in this second book in Pamela Thomas-Graham's critically acclaimed Ivy League Mystery series.

A Darker Shade of Crimson by Pamela Thomas-Graham