Orange Crushed: An Ivy League Mystery.

Orange Crushed: An Ivy League Mystery by Pamela Thomas-Graham Simon & Schuster, June 2004 $24.00, ISBN 0-684-84528-8

First, there was A Darker Shade of Crimson (Simon & Schuster, April 1998) and then Blue Blood (Simon & Schuster, May 1999), which introduced the amateur sleuth, Professor Nikki Chase. At 29, this brilliant, very attractive and style-conscious sister, who also has her share of romantic misadventures, is the first and only black woman on the Harvard economics faculty. In the earlier novels she successfully solves murders at Harvard and at Yale, and the solutions to both cases are deeply embedded in matters of sex, race and power. Orange Crushed finds Nikki, not very long at all after these prior adventures, on Princeton's distinctively picturesque New Jersey campus just before the Christmas holidays for an academic conference and a visit with her brother, a Princeton graduate student in African American studies. She also checks in with her former teacher and mentor, Professor Earl Stokes, the author of the New York Times best-seller "Color Counts," who now heads Princeton's African American studies department.

Stokes's body turns up among the smoldering ruins of a tire set on the construction site of the new Center for African American Studies, and her borther, Eric, becomes a suspect. But nothing gets past Nikki, who scopes out reasons that maW other people could have wanted Professor Stokes dead, including, in a clever twist on real-life ties of loyalty and rivalry between black scholars at Harvard and Princeton, Harvard's head of African American Studies, the enterprising and ubiquitous Professor Percy "Butch" Hubbard.

Following the pattern set by her previous novels, Thomas-Graham delivers another well plotted, fast-paced, witty and sometimes even sexy narrative, with the bonus of sharply observed social commentary about the vagaries of power, race, class and gender in elite institutions and in society in general.

Susan McHenry Susan McHenry, BIBR's founding editor, currently serves as editorial director.