From the best-selling author of The Emperor of Ocean Park and The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln-a new novel of terrific suspense and surprise: a brilliant amalgam of fact and fiction about a young black woman on whom the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis depends.October 1962. In Cuba: Soviet ships off-load what intelligence reveals to be nuclear missiles. In Washington, President Kennedy and his advisers are in furious debate over how long they can wait to discover what the Soviets intend before dropping the first bomb. And, in Ithaca, New York, Margo Jensen-a nineteen-year-old Cornell sophomore-is swept up in a "bizarre concatenation of circumstances" that will make of her the "back channel" liaison between Soviet Premier Khrushchev and Kennedy. Events unfold too quickly for her even to ask "why me?" But the stunning answer is revealed bit by bit as she races from Ithaca to Bulgaria to Washington, D.C., drawn ever more deeply into the...

From Publishers WeeklyDominic 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.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From The New YorkerSet 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. Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

Stephen L. Carter's brilliant debut thriller, The Emperor of Ocean Park, spent eleven weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and was followed by two nationwide best sellers, New England White and Palace Council. Now, in Jericho's Fall, Carter returns us to the high-stakes world of power, privilege, and conspiracy. In an imposing house in the Colorado Rockies, Jericho Ainsley, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency and longtime Wall Street titan, lies dying. Jericho summons to his bedside Beck DeForde, the younger woman for whom he threw his career away twenty years ago, miring them both in scandal. Beck believes she is there to say good-bye, but she is quickly and unwittingly drawn into a battle of wits being fought over an explosive secret that foreign governments and powerful corporations alike want to wrest from Jericho before he dies. An intricate, fast-moving thriller that plumbs the emotional depths of a failed love affair and a family torn apart by mistrust, Jericho's Fall embraces a wide range of issues, from the morality of intelligence operations to the meltdown of the world financial system. And it creates, in Beck DeForde, an unforgettable heroine for our turbulent modern age.

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)