Orange Crushed: An Ivy League Mystery

BOOK IS 3RD IN A SERIES BY PAMELA THOMAS-GRAHAM. IT ROUNDS OUT THE BIG THREE (HARVARD, YALE, & PRINCETON). GOOD MYSTERY, ALTHOUGH SHE DOES USE THE BOOKS AS A PLATFORM FOR HER POLITICAL VIEWS WHICH TAKES SOMETHING AWAY FROM AN OTHERWISE ENGROSSING TALE.

I do have to admit that some of the themes are getting a little played. I did expect Dante and Nikki to be a bit further along and over some of the sophomoric sexual tension, and the "passing" thing is well...enough already. In any case, I still enjoyed it (funny, action mystery, the comedy of the characters in academe all great) and I am looking forward to the next one!

Good book in good condition

I love mystery books, and I especially love mysteries written by black authors, with black protagonists. I've read everything from Walter Mosely's Easy Rawlins to Valerie Wilson Wesley's Tamara Hayle to Barbara Neely's sleuthing domestic Blanche. I also like to welcome new black writers to the mystery genre, such as Ian Smith (The Blackbird Papers). It was in that spirit I read A Darker Shade of Crimson, the first mystery featuring Pamela Thomas Graham's Harvard professor Nikki Chase. I enjoyed this first effort and thought the Ivy League theme had a lot of promise. While I've yet to read Graham's second installment of the series, Blue Blood, I bought the third book, Orange Crushed, with high expectations. I finished the book this morning, and I have to say I was disappointed. Chase never actually solves the mystery at all. Instead, the rest of the book's characters (including a plethora of minor ones) basically hand her the answers, piece by piece. There is a difference between solving a puzzle and filling in all the boxes correctly because other people gave you the answers. Chase does a lot of guessing, speculating and wondering, but she figures absolutely nothing out for herself. As a result, she comes off as bright and involved, but not particularly perceptive, and hardly worthy of the sleuth designation. Since a double-Harvard, ex-Wall Street executive can hardly be expected to have formal training as a criminal investigator, it is crucial that Chase exhibit some natural talent for deductive reasoning, attention to detail, reading people and problem solving. Yet she spent nearly all of the book having literally no clue of what was really going on around her, even with her own baby brother. Read Neely's Blanche series for a more believable "accidental" detective. Also, there are a number of mistakes that pierce the veil of reality every good book creates. For example, there is a reference to the Houston Oilers in a book ostensibly set in the present, i.e. 2004. The NFL's Houston Oilers ceased to be nearly a decade ago (they are now the Tennessee Titans). Again, I think the murder-in-the- Ivy-League premise brims with promise. However, Orange Crushed falls far short of fulfillment of that potential.

I liked this book, but there was something missing in comparison to the other two in this series. Nikki Chase, the lead character, is a professor at Harvard who keeps finding herself in the middle of murder investigations. The first two books in this series made it totally believable that this could happen to her, but by the time you get to the third book and she's involved in another murder mystery, you almost want to roll your eyes. Why does this keep happening to her? At any rate, I like the characters and some of the book is extremely funny, but I also got sick of how the plot sort of just dragged along. And there were obvious potential clues that she didn't pursue and this was frustrating. Some things she just let slide by. So in a nutshell, this is a good mystery that went unsolved for too long.

Murder and mayhem seems to follow Veronica "Nikki" Chase wherever she goes. When we first met her, this Harvard economics professor solved a murder on her home campus. Then, she investigated a death on Yale's grounds. In ORANGE CRUSHED, Thomas-Graham's third book in the Ivy League mystery series, Nikki is on the case when her friend and mentor dies at Princeton. Rumors have been flooding both Harvard and Princeton that Earl Stokes, a noted African-American studies and economics scholar, was on his way to becoming a Harvard department head and leaving his Princeton roots behind. Nonetheless, Earl is the force behind a new African-American Studies building at Princeton that would bring the program abundant success. But Nikki smells a rat in her mentor's midst, and her hunch is confirmed when Earl turns up dead. Nikki sifts through the suspects one by one, searching for motive and opportunity. Thomas-Graham is fast becoming one of my favorite mystery writers. She injects humor into her stories and into her characters, making Nikki Chase and her crew people who I would love to hang out with. She writes extremely well, with fluidity, grace, and poise. Using Ivy League colleges as a fresh backdrop and an amateur investigator as a sleuth, Thomas-Graham keeps me on the edge of my seat until the end. I'm officially hooked on this series, and I am anxious to see which campus Nikki will leave her mark on next. Reviewed by CandaceK of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers

I highly recommend this book. The storyline is intriguing and the characters are wonderfully crafted. It is a first class mystery with all the thrills and chills one has come to expect from the Nikki Chase series. The detailed description of college life at Princeton is richly woven into the story and unveils an inside perspective of the choices available for African-Americans at this esteemed campus. Nikki's opinions of Princeton, carefully steeped in fact, are adeptly contrasted by Eric's (the lead character's brother) reality of the life he has crafted for himself at Princeton. The novel carefully unfolds the different schools of thought on African-American studies and its value to Ivy League institutions. It is an interesting read from start to finish