From Publishers Weekly

Dominic Hoffman's voice possesses a touch of sandpaper that causes every word to be rubbed raw before emerging from between his lips. The hardboiled sensation is appropriate for law professor and novelist Carters suspenseful story of secret societies, political intrigue, and the social swirl of Harlems 1950s elite. Eddie Wesley, a writer and member of African-American high society, finds himself thrust into a shadowy world of murder and espionage, forced to use his authorial skills to uncover the truth. Hoffmans occasional forays into doing voices, like those of Vietnamese police officers, are unfortunate, but the grain of his voice is alluring enough that listeners will want him to just keep going. A Knopf hardcover (Reviews, May 19).(Aug.)
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From The New Yorker

Set primarily in the years between 1954 and 1974—what Carter calls the "two decades" of the sixties—this political thriller leaves virtually no important person or event unturned. Richard Nixon, Langston Hughes, and dissident groups all play roles as the action shifts from Harlem to Washington and Saigon. After Eddie Wesley stumbles upon the body of a prominent lawyer who died clutching the talisman of a secret society in his fist, he finds himself caught up in the machinations of spies and assassins. Untangling the so-called Palace Council’s purpose gains new urgency when Eddie’s sister suddenly vanishes. At the same time, Aurelia, the ex-girlfriend for whom he still carries a torch, is on her own path to discovering the enigmatic group’s secrets. While Carter offers a finely drawn picture of the complicated black social world, and the high-reaching conspiracy has its allure, he seems to strain to pull his story together—discarded candy wrappers become a clue to the anticlimactic finish.
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The Barnes & Noble ReviewYale law professor Stephen L. Carter -- widely known for his keenly insightful works of political, social, and legal commentary -- offers a stunning fiction debut that distills his observations on government and human behavior into a spellbinding tale of one person's search for justice.Talcott Garland, a law professor at an unnamed Ivy League university, is snapped out of his private world of personal dissatisfactions by the death of his father, Judge Oliver Garland. Talcott s sister, a conspiracy theorist and former journalist, quickly concludes that the conservative, opinionated judge -- one of the few African-American nominees for the Supreme Court in the 1980s -- was the victim not of a heart attack but of foul play. Her ranting is dismissed as the product of misplaced grief and an overactive imagination, but after two other people turn up dead -- the bishop who performed the judge s funeral ceremony and a man who claimed to be an FBI agent (he is later revealed to have been a private detective) -- Talcott decides to investigate. He knows that 15 years earlier his father, faced with scandal, was forced to withdraw from consideration for the high court, but he is not prepared for the unsavory secrets he begins to uncover about his father's professional life. Nor does he realize that he's become a pawn in a fatal game that threatens to destroy his sanity and long-sought happiness. Dense with subplots that provide an inside view of Washington politics, the privileged world of Northeast upper-crust African-American society, and the inner workings of an Ivy League law school, this sweeping novel is a masterful portrayal of how justice can twisted by public figures to serve private purposes, as well as a telling meditation on the corruptible nature of our structured society and power-crazed culture. (Will Romano)