This novel brings to light the intelligence and power of an African-American domestic female worker in the midst of a racist and sexist society.

[3] Throughout European and American history, upper class and upper-middle-class families had a prevailing attitude of ignoring their servants until they were needed for labor.

Enslaved Africans found themselves in a position in which they were left to deal, without support of the law or society, the immoral slavery in the United States.

There is a disturbance out in the hall and she takes her chance to escape by slipping out of the restroom and making her way to the exit and out into the underground parking lot.

She walks quickly out of the area and finds herself in the neighborhood to a job she had got from the Ty-Dee Girls agency she cancelled for that week.

That day she learns that one of the family members, Aunt Emmeline, is a drunk or at least that is what she assumes, and is a witness to her Will signing that hands over the control of her nephew, Mumsfield‘s, money to his cousins, Grace and Everett.

He does not explain his reasoning but she intends to find out, all the while planning her move to New York, later Boston, to escape the Sheriff and the jail sentence she is running from.

She is happy that she does not have to worry about him anymore and that she does not have to leave for Boston, but it strikes her after she remembers the conversation she eavesdropped on just the evening before that the Sheriff would not have committed suicide.

The same day Nate comes and tells her that he saw someone wearing a pink jacket walking the short-cut route to the place where the Sheriff died.

Blanche finds clues here and there and eventually learns that the Aunt Emmeline she saw sign the will was an impostor and that the real woman had been killed.

Blanche, however, takes advantage of Grace's ignorance by pretending to be a former employee so that she can get hired even though she has a warrant out for her arrest.

Blanche suspects the Sheriff to be blackmailing (or as she calls it "white male") Everett so that he does not tell Grace he cheated on her.

Blanche catches Symington calling in favors to keep Nate's murder committed by one of his family members out of court to avoid a scandal.

Blanche notes about Aunt Emmeline that she "looked like a drunken Little Orphan Annie at eighty, with her frizzy yellow hair and blank, watery eyes.

"[4] Following the tradition of many black artist in the 20th century, Barbara Neely uses the mystery/crime genre to incorporate themes of deception and perception.

It allows her to move unseen, to discover the Carter family secrets, and ultimately turns her in to a crafty detective who solves all the crime in the novel.

Blanche soon discovers that she can unravel more of Grace and Everett's treacherous plot to inherit Mumsfield's money because she is in the house, whereas Nate, as a man, is working outside.

The biggest twist, that Grace is the mass murderer and plotter of cheating her family out of their fortune, exposes the sexist notions that the readers themselves have rooted into their culture.

Even though, the heroine and the villain of this novel evoke different emotions from the readers, there is a larger feminist theme in play that is made possible by taking advantage of the cloak of invisibility that society has placed over women.

In I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like: The Voice and Vision of Black Women Writers, Rebecca Carroll interviews Barbara Neely, and she discusses how she formed Blanche White: "The character of Blanche initially came from a woman I knew in North Carolina who had a look that inspired me to create a heroine in her memory...I knew I wanted her to be representative of who black women are, presently and historically.

[4] During the antebellum and postbellum periods in American slavery, the black body was made into a part of a mass marketing scheme.

Stereotypes centered around the negative connotations of blacks having dark skin, nappy hair, and other physical attributes.

[6] Neely scored major accolades with her first novel, winning the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Awards for Blanche on the Lam.