Soho
Published August 1, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Daphne Ouverture was elated when she was offered a job at Harrison University. Though she had earned a PhD in European history, with a focus on French imperialism, and had a contract for a book on Black families in eighteenth-century France, she wasn’t guaranteed any kind of job, much less a tenure-track position at a prestigious private institution. She would like to keep it, despite the frustrations of living in a small town with few dating prospects, an underlying suspicion among many of her colleagues that being Black gave her an edge she didn’t deserve, and a disastrous dean who seems to think it’s time to rein in this diversity thing. It’s a quiet, if demanding life unlike that of her globe-trotting parents – until she gets a strange text message in bad French from Sam Taylor, a sociology professor who is a rising campus star. As she’s puzzling over what it might mean, the police are called to his apartment where his fiancee has found him murdered.
Unable to resist the mystery, Daphne manages to carve out some time in her busy schedule of teaching, writing grant proposals, and advising students to work out the source of phrase in broken French. She has a vivid memory for texts, which makes her in demand from professors who suspect plagiarism. The garbled quote, she realizes, is drawn from a little-known French novel that she has in her personal library, but when she tries to nail it down she finds her copy of the book is gone. Meanwhile, she learns through the grapevine that Sam Taylor, whose habit of staring at her had often made her uncomfortable, used his position to seduce students. While the officials on campus praise the dead scholar, she learns more and more about how his pose of being committed to social justice is tarnished by his habits of grandstanding and sexual exploitation.
As she digs into his past, she’s stalked and attacked. Someone apparently thinks she has something they want, though she’s not sure what it is. If she could only find that book, maybe it would become clear. Meanwhile, her department chair has brought her yet another possible instance of plagiarism. Daphne recognizes a passage as something a graduate student wrote but hasn’t yet published, putting her in the position of proving an academic offense against a powerful figure on campus, her word against his. All of this unfolds against the backdrop of tenure, a process of proving oneself that carries steep odds and the potential for disaster.
This promising debut has some flaws typical of first books. It has many elements of a cozy, including a cast of eccentric friends and lots of humor, while also dealing with dark material. The plot is very busy, and the tone is not always consistent, particularly when it comes to the romance between Daphne and an ex-cop-turned-bookseller, a love-at-first-site affair that reduces this intelligent scholar to the gushings of a preteen crush. The dreadful dean is not unrealistic except for being so unsubtle about his retro racist attitudes – hardly rare at prestigious campuses, but usually better concealed.
Apart from these quibbles, it’s a strong beginning. Its knowing and often hilarious depiction of academia is spot-on: the faculty member who derails a meeting with a long digression packed with critical theory jargon that never gets to a point; the student who sees everything in terms of her favorite progressive cause; the day-to-day grind of grading papers written by students who get things bizarrely wrong. There’s insider knowledge at play, here, but it’s fond satire without bitterness.
Daphne’s generous and thoughtful relationships with her students show higher education at its best. Seeing the academy through the eyes of a young woman of color shows its failings. Most invigorating is the author’s defense of the value of history as a noble pursuit of truth, knowing that sometimes the truth hurts. It involves reading against the grain, hunting for evidence and chasing leads. The skills Daphne uses in French archives as she looks for an elusive piece of information have trained her well for another kind of sleuthing. Since this appears to be the beginning of a series, we can hope there are more adventures ahead for this intriguing protagonist.