Clever campus hijinks meet murder mystery in History Lessons, Zoe B. Wallbrook's debut novel. History Lessons follows Daphne Ouverture, the daughter of Ivorian immigrant mother and Louisiana Creole father, and a new junior professor at the prestigious Harrison University. Daphne is one of few Black people on the faculty and she specializes in French colonial history, so she's confused when she receives a strange text from Sam Taylor, a white colleague in the anthropology department with whom she's had very few interactions.
She deletes the text and doesn't think much more about it until the next day, when university gossip runs wild about Sam's murder the night before. Daphne wasn't a huge fan of Sam's, but she can't stop pondering his cryptic text. She realizes Sam may have been referencing an obscure French Guianese novel they had discussed, so she starts nosing around to see whether university politics played a part in Sam's death. After she gets hit over the head by an unknown assailant, however, both Daphne and the police realize that she's far more central to the case than expected.
Inventive and sure to make anyone with experience in academia laugh, History Lessons is an excellent debut. Fans of Kellye Garrett or Elle Cosimano will appreciate Wallbrook's witty banter and layering of humor with the macabre. The mystery plot is twisty, the colonial history is illuminating, the sly references to white bias in academia are funny, and Daphne herself is a delightfully verbose character, who will hopefully appear in more novels to come. --Jessica Howard, former bookseller, freelance book reviewer