Blue Blood (Ivy League Mysteries)
by Pamela Thomas-Graham

Murder returns to the Ivy League in this second book in Pamela Thomas-Graham’s critically acclaimed Ivy League Mystery series. 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. Thomas-Graham’s previous novel, A Darker Shade of Crimson. 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. 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. 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. But when he becomes a suspect in the murder, Nikki finds herself turning detective again. 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. 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. 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. Soon all of New Haven becomes polarized along racial lines. 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. It takes the full complement of her trademark tenacity — along with some help from her friends back at Harvard — to uncover the deadly secrets hidden behind Yale’s ivied fa ade.