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Popular Culture Review
mitment in equally strong measures is Nikki Chase, Pamela Graham-Thomas’ young
African-American Harvard assistant professor of Economics. Energetic, coura
geous, outspoken, sexy, and self-confident, Nikki is driven by strong liberal politi
cal convictions, but also by less-than-dogmatic personal loyalties and curiosities.
She dates frequently, but also still longs for Dante Rosario, her Italian ex-boyfriend from a distant past, who returned to Harvard and coincidentally moved into
the same house where Nikki rents an apartment. Her dates have included a 20-year
old persistent student (with whom she goes to a Harvard fundraising dance, appar
ently unconcerned about what people might say), and a few men from whom she
wants information for her investigations. Nikki becomes an investigator mostly by
chance - in A Darker Shade o f Crimson, she finds the body of her friend Ella, the
Dean of Students, and she has to find Ella’s records for her work on the “Crimson
Future Committee.” In Blue Blood, she goes to New Haven to comfort her friend
Gary, whose beautiful and controversial conservative wife has been brutally mur
dered in a black neighborhood. Once she begins detecting, Nikki is driven, inde
pendent, and not easily frightened or discouraged, not even after being attacked in
the Ɩ'&'