Rating: 
Summary: Economist? What Economist?
Review: While other reviewers seem to have read the book because it was about a black, or a woman, or Harvard, or because it was written by a black woman from Harvard, I read it because the main character was an economist. And in that respect, I was sorely disappointed.Nikki Chase has a job in the Economics Department at Harvard, but she uses no economic insights, economic logic, or economic laws to help her figure out the crime. By comparison the "Henry Spearman" series by Marshall Jevons, or the various books by Russell Roberts, all feature protagonists who make use of the laws of economics. In the Henry Spearman books, such issues as changes in relative prices, opportunity cost, and economic constraints factor in to the solution. Russell Roberts even uses the ghost of David Ricardo, a famous British Classical economist, to tell one of his stories. But author Pamela Thomas-Graham, despite having been an undergraduate economics major, shows no evidence of understanding anything about economics. It is important that Nikki Chase is a professor, but she could as easily have been in sociology, physics, or basket weaving for the importance that the academic field itself played in the plot. That is, she uses the flexibility allowed in academia to take time off during the day to wander around and check stuff out; in a non-academic position, it would be much harder to do this. However, this ability to wander around campus during the day time is hardly unique to economists. Likewise, Thomas-Graham's undergraduate experiences have shown through this work. Her heroine carries around a backpack like an undergraduate; I don't know of any professors who do so. A brief case, a stachel, or even a tote bag are more likely devices.
In addition, the lead character is apparently required to write papers for her department head. This is extremely odd. While collaborations certainly exist in academia, I am completely unfamiliar with (indeed shocked at) the idea that a department head can order a junior faculty member to write his articles for him. I doubt that a Harvard department chairman needs a junior faculty member to do so; after all, the Harvard charman got where he is by doing outstanding work in the first place. Given all that, I found that the book flowed reasonably well. I had no problem sitting down and reading for an hour or two. I was not particularly annoyed by the fairly mild exploration of racial issues (as were some of the other reviewers), and I was only mildly annoyed at the frequent name-dropping. (I confess to not understanding all of the dropped references to locations, brand names, and other things that the author thought important enough to push at me.) However, by the end, I had no particular interest in whodunit. I didn't care whether the killer was the janitor, the president, the cop, the pizza delivery kid, or even Nikki Chase herself. When the author finally revealed the killer, I was not surprised, shocked, or self-congratulatory. I was merely through with the book. That said, I did go ahead and read the next book in the series, in the hopes that the author had worked out a few kinks in the first book and the second would be better. And my thoughts on that work are pretty much the same. I doubt I will read anything else by this author.
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