The Emperor Of Ocean Park

'Beautifully written and cleverly plotted' John Grisham

Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University, where he has taught since 1982. He is the author of seven non-fiction books. He and his family live near New Haven, Connecticut.

Judge Oliver Garland has just died in suspicious circumstances. Conservative and controversial, Garland had many enemies. Many years ago, he'd earned a judge's highest prize: a Supreme Court nomination. But in a scene of bitter humiliation in front of a televised audience and before the eyes of his family, he had to withdraw his nomination. It was a national scandal, and a private agony, one from which he never recovered. Now, year's later, The judge's death raises even more questions than his life did and seems to be leading to a second terrible scandal. Could he have been murdered? He has left a strange message for his son Talcott, a professor at an elite Ivy League law school, entrusting him with 'the arrangements' - a mysterious puzzle that only Tal can unlock, and only by unearthing the ambiguities of his father's turbulent past. When another man is found dead, and then another, Talcott must risk life, marriage and reputation, following the clues his father left him.

Palace Council

One man will uncover a plot to control the world's most powerful nation... 
 
The devastating and powerful thriller from the bestselling author of The Emperor of Ocean Park.

A brilliant literary thriller, packed with insight, intelligence and ideas...Eye-opening and absorbing: I really couldn't put it down

Carter employs conspiratorial and paranoid plotting to highlight the reality of American political division ...skilled at injecting pace and tension...a historical thriller that efficiently delivers both thrills and history, especially in the still under-developed chronicles of black America

Crisp and enthralling...an ambitious novel...that covers the social, political and cultural changes in post-war America from the point of view of the black elite

Insights into a realm little known in the UK

[Carter is] a very good storyteller... readers will find the Harlem of this book downright intriguing

Very successful as a page turning thriller, pacy enough and containing enough plot twists to keep the reader guessing while at the same time never feeling contrived ... It is a thriller in the best sense of the word and one that is well worth investigating

Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University, where he has taught since 1982. He is also the author of the bestselling novels The Emperor of Ocean Park and New England White, and several books of non-fiction. He and his family live near New Haven, Connecticut.

Summer, 1952. Twenty powerful men gather in secret and devise a plot to manipulate the President of the United States. 
 
Soon after, writer Eddie Wesley leaves a party hosted by affluent and influential members of black society, and discovers a body. The murdered man had an unusual gold cross gripped between his hands and Eddie is determined to find out why he was killed and what the cross signifies. 
 
But then Eddie's sister Junie becomes entangled in an underground movement and vanishes... 
 
Is her disappearance connected to the conspiracy to control the President of the United States?

Stephen L Carter

My ideal literary thriller. Not only genuinely exciting, it is bursting with ideas and insights

A shivers-down-your-spine mystery...The book crackles with depictions of campus politics and strained relations between black and white America

A very rare thing indeed: an intellectually stimulating thriller by a writer who is as concerned with an exploration of character and motive as he is in ending each of his short mini-chapters with a cliffhanger

When The Emperor of Ocean Park was published, the Observer declared: 'The book is superb, both as a thriller and as a novel of social observation.' Now, with that same astute social observation, narrative drive, and richness of plot and character, Stephen Carter returns us to the New England university town of Elm Harbor, where the murder of a renowned African-American economist opens a door on the racial complications of the town's past, on one family's secrets, and on the most hidden and powerful bastions of African-American political influence. 
 
At the centre are Lemaster and Julia Carlyle. He is president of the university, she is a dean at the divinity school - African-Americans living in 'the heart of whiteness'. Lemaster's connections lead to the President of the United States, his old college room-mate. Julia is connected to the dead man, Kellen Zant, her lover before she met Lemaster. The meeting point of these connections - a murder committed and covered up in Elm Harbor thirty years ago, and the shocking plans carried out by a fraternity of the 'darker nation' - forms the core of a mystery that deepens even as Julia, guided by clues left her by Zant, closes in on the politically earth-shattering motive behind his murder. 
 
Suspenseful from first to last, galvanising in its exploration of the profound difference between allegiance to ideas and to people, New England White is a resounding confirmation of Stephen Carter's gifts as a writer of fiction.

Stephen L Carter

Praise for New England White

My ideal literary thriller. Not only genuinely exciting, it is bursting with ideas and insights

Absorbing and beautifully written

A shivers-down-your-spine mystery...The book crackles with depictions of campus politics and strained relations between black and white America

My ideal literary thriller. Not only genuinely exciting, it is bursting with ideas and insights

Absorbing and beautifully written

A shivers-down-your-spine mystery...The book crackles with depictions of campus politics and strained relations between black and white America

My ideal literary thriller. Not only genuinely exciting, it is bursting with ideas and insights

Absorbing and beautifully written

A shivers-down-your-spine mystery...The book crackles with depictions of campus politics and strained relations between black and white America

Books by Stephen L Carter

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