HISTORY LESSONS

A history professor well versed in the abuses of the past turns her formidable skills to fighting the injustices of the present.

Although bringing up the way “nineteenth-century Belgian colonial administrators in the Congo dismembered indigenous Africans for the purpose of scaring local villagers into creating profit for their newly emerging rubber industry” turns out to be enough of a buzzkill to discourage potential dating partners, Prof. Daphne Ouverture’s encyclopedic knowledge of colonial history earns her the admiration of her students and the respect of many of her colleagues—excluding, of course, the ones who can’t distinguish her from sociologist Tiffany LaFleur, who also happens to be Black. Daphne is a powerhouse: perceptive, empathetic, and endlessly witty. Just listening to her dish with best friends Sadie and Elise is worth the price of admission. When a colleague is murdered, Daphne is drawn into the investigation, because moments before he was killed, he'd sent her a cryptic text message in French. Daphne proves herself as astute a detective as she is a scholar because, after all, what is history but discovering the past? What she finds is both shocking and all too predictable. In focusing solely on Daphne, Wallbrook misses an opportunity to highlight another interesting woman: Asma Ahmed, the police detective assigned to the case. Wallbrook allows occasional peeks into Asma’s interior life, but opening the door more fully into her secondary characters would move her into the first ranks of the mystery world.

Readers should be on the alert for a follow-up to this promising debut.