Black Excellence

From the author of the GMA Book Club Pick The Lagos Wife comes a compelling novel of class, ambition, and family secrets, in which a housekeeper's suspicious death shatters the facade of a wealthy Black family and exposes the hidden costs of success.

The Harrises are the embodiment of “Black excellence”: wealthy, influential, and admired throughout Brooklyn’s Park Slope. Led by the glamorous and powerful Shayla and Dom Harris, they seem to have it all...until they return home one evening to find their longtime housekeeper, Nelcie, dead in their brownstone. What initially appears to be a tragic accident takes a darker turn when Nelcie’s final words implicate the Harrises’ teenage son, Adam.

In the aftermath, Nelcie’s daughter Renée is struggling to reconcile the mother who spent her life caring for other people’s families with the woman those families barely knew. As the Harrises return to their enviable lives, Renée refuses to let her mother’s death become an inconvenient footnote.

Sharp and poignant, Black Excellence explores the fault lines of race and class—and the hidden costs of a picture-perfect life.