BLUE BLOOD - Hardcover

Thomas-Graham, Pamela

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 068484527X ISBN 13: 9780684845272

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1999

Synopsis

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 façade.

About this title

About the Author:

Pamela Thomas-Graham is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard-Radcliffe College. A graduate of Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, Thomas-Graham was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. The first black woman partner at McKinsey & Company, the world's largest management consulting firm, Thomas-Graham serves on the boards of the New York City Opera, the American Red Cross of Greater New York, and the Harvard Alumni Association. She divides her time between Manhattan and Westchester County with her husband, Lawrence Otis Graham, a writer and attorney, and their son. Blue Blood is her second novel.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One: We're Not in Cambridge Anymore

Georgian. Gothic. Houses. Colleges. The Yard. Old Campus. Widener. Sterling. Finals Clubs. Secret Societies. George Plimpton. William F. Buckley. Conan O'Brien. Dick Cavett. John F. Kennedy. George H. Bush. Shabby chic. Just plain shabby.

The differences between Harvard and Yale are limitless and distinct, and none more important than this: while a Harvard graduate invariably bleeds crimson, at Yale the blood always runs blue.

I jumped into the left lane. But the Buick got there first. So I signaled right and floored the gas. Anticipating me, the Buick glided back into the right lane and mockingly flashed its taillights. I pumped hard on my brakes. The Buick slowed down even more. No jury would have convicted me at that point, so I decided it was time to run him off the road.

The third Monday of November found me racing down I-95 South on my way from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to New Haven, Connecticut. It was pouring rain, and I was tailgating a dark brown Buick station wagon being driven by a maddeningly oblivious elderly man. I was about to escalate from riding his fender to full-blown light-blinking, horn-blowing, and cursing.

Because I had to get to Yale. Fast. Even though it was too late.

Amanda was already dead.

Finally, the Buick drifted casually into the middle lane and I jetted past, my foot pressing the accelerator so hard that the car doors rattled. My landlady had loaned me her red '87 Chevy Cavalier for the day, after I'd promised to treat it gently. But there was no gentleness left in the world that morning.

Amanda Fox, the wife of one of my oldest friends, had been found dead the night before on a deserted street in New Haven, on the outskirts of the Yale campus. She'd been stabbed five times, and her left hand had been severed at the wrist. I was trying not to think about it. If I thought too much, I'd have to pull over again; then I'd never make it to New Haven.

And Gary needed me. Really needed me.

My name is Veronica Chase, Nikki to my friends. An Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard, I am the only black in the fifty-person department. At thirty years old, I feel alternately exhilarated and overwhelmed by the responsibility that my position entails. That morning, overwhelmed didn't even begin to describe how I felt.

I first met Garrett Fox eleven years ago when I moved into Dunster House, my undergraduate dorm at Harvard. Ten years my senior, Gary at the time was a resident tutor and an Associate Professor in the History Department. We became friends because we both studied every evening in the House library, a cozy, wood-paneled room with an expanse of French windows and a working fireplace, and we fell into the habit of grabbing coffee at Tommy's Lunch after the librarian shooed us out at closing time. Gary was bookish, gangly, and unreasonably attractive: behind his wire-rimmed glasses were a pair of mesmerizing gray eyes, and he usually wore thick, nubbly sweaters of the type that made me want to crawl right into them. I had a huge crush on him for about a week, but it quickly receded into a lasting friendship. Since he was half a generation older than I, he became like the big brother I never had -- counseling me on classes, summer jobs, and numerous affairs of the heart. I treasured his advice, and there was nothing that I wouldn't have done for him.

At least, until the day he announced that he was marrying Amanda Ingersol.

Amanda was the golden girl of my college class: five feet ten, with tawny blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and legs a mile long; she was always suspiciously gorgeous, even at 9:00 A.M. She was fourth-generation Harvard by way of Manhattan, and as a freshman exuded an aura of WASP affluence and bored sophistication that I immediately both loathed and envied. It became clear to me during my first week in Cambridge that being from the Midwest was second only to hailing from the South in inspiring disdain and pity from the likes of Amanda and her Upper East Side, private-school crowd -- and being treated like a bumpkin tended to make me testy. My irritation bordered on the homicidal after an episode at a black-tie dinner in the Master's Residence our sophomore year. "Nikki," she'd called out to me as I sat between a Dean and a visiting scholar from Oxford, struggling to eat my first lobster, "I wish I had a video camera. It's so refreshing to see someone attack their food with such childlike innocence."

Since Amanda lived in Dunster House, it was impossible to ignore her, although it would have been difficult in any case, given her penchant for striding around campus with a three-quarter-length raccoon coat tossed over her shoulders. ("It was my grandmother's at Smith," she'd explain.) She managed to infuriate almost every woman I knew, usually as a result of her irritating ability to fascinate every male with whom she came into contact. My differences with her, however, went well beyond minor skirmishes over boys: she was madly conservative politically, which in my book is the one truly unforgivable sin. As the editor-in-chief of The Salient, the Republican rag on campus, Amanda wrote more than one editorial about affirmative action that nearly brought us to blows. Conveniently ignoring the fact that as an alumni child she herself had received preferential treatment from the admissions office, she openly derided the university's desire for diversity in the incoming class and once actually challenged me to reveal my SAT scores during a particularly heated argument. By graduation day, I hated her with the kind of passion that only a twenty-one-year-old can muster, but took consolation in knowing that soon I'd be rid of her. And then Gary announced that he was marrying her.

Calling this news earth-shattering would grossly understate its impact. I felt utterly betrayed. As far as I knew, Amanda and Gary had never exchanged more than casual greetings in the dining room. He had never said a word about her to me. And now they were getting married? Everyone had assumed that Amanda either would return to New York and become a Republican-party fund-raiser, or move to DC and disappear into some far-right yahoo congressman's staff. Either way, we figured that in three or four years, she'd have married a man twice her age and be living on Park Avenue or ensconced in a town house in Georgetown. But instead, there she was, standing beside Gary in the Dunster courtyard, sweetly proclaiming that they were moving to New Haven, that Gary had an exciting opportunity at Yale, that she would be entering Yale Law School, that her aim was to become a law professor. A professor!

Why would a budding politico such as she take up with an impecunious academic? And how could he do this to me? Gary was my friend, my father-confessor. Not her secret lover.

They were married in a very small ceremony at Cambridge City Hall three days later.

Silence prevailed between Gary and me for almost two years afterward.

But then I stumbled across him in a New Haven pizzeria while on a road trip to the annual Harvard-Yale Game, and somehow all of my anger and resentment suddenly seemed very distant and petty, and I was instantly reminded of how much I missed his friendship. Soon we fell into the routine of regular phone calls and an annual rendezvous at The Game. Whenever we spoke, it was like picking up the last conversation in midstream, and I luxuriated in the warmth of an old, stimulating friendship that had been renewed.

Of Amanda, we spoke very little. I knew that she was becoming very well known and highly controversial. She'd clerked for the most conservative Supreme Court Justice after graduating from Yale Law, and had networked her way around Washington so well that she was publish

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 068484527X
• ISBN 13: 9780684845272
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288