‘Jericho’s Fall’ by Stephen L. Carter

Stephen L. Carter is a formidable legal scholar with a gift for turning out sophisticated, multilayered works of popular fiction.

“Jericho’s Fall” -- an intricate spy thriller that proceeds at breakneck speed from mystery to revelation and back again -- marks a clear departure in his work, one that is likely to win him an even larger audience, and deservedly so. This is the sort of book Graham Greene used to call “an entertainment” and Greene’s readers, who savored those novels’ unselfconscious erudition and matter-of-fact moral complexity, as well as their engaging plots, are likely to feel themselves on familiar ground here.

As Yale’s William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Carter has been a tactful but fearlessly independent explorer of territory sown with hair-triggered legal and social mines in books including “The Dissent of the Governed: A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty” and “Integrity.” As a religious believer in an academic environment where secular skepticism is virtually a given and as an African American scholar among predominantly white colleagues, Carter’s perspective is singular -- that, along with a deep empathy, translates into a gift for rich, convincing characterization. These qualities, along with a facility for believable plots that function on several levels, were skillfully deployed in his bestselling thrillers: the legally themed “The Emperor of Ocean Park” and the discerning novel of manners “New England White.”

The plot of “Jericho’s Fall” seems ripped from recent headlines involving the Central Intelligence Agency, the theories and morality of interrogation, and the wreck of elite Wall Street firms sailing too close to the ethical wind. Carter’s novels always have preoccupied themselves as much with the families, friends and associates of significant figures as with the character ostensibly at the center of events. This new novel is no exception.

Living in exile

Jericho Ainsley is the scion of an old New England family, a former director of Central Intelligence, former secretary of Defense, former national security advisor, former partner in a high-flying private equity investment firm -- “former everything,” as he is several times described. For 14 years he has lived in exile from the power he so relished because of a scandalous affair with a 19-year-old coed. As the narrative begins, he is dying of cancer and summons the now 34-year-old woman who was perhaps his great passion and also his undoing. “Perhaps” is the operative word here, because -- as events unfold over the next six days through the eyes of “the other woman,” Rebecca DeForde -- the truth about both past and present will seem an increasingly malleable commodity.

In the intelligence netherworld that Jericho seems to inhabit so happily and instinctively, “Beck” -- as Rebecca is called -- soon discovers that “truth” always is a means to an end and not an end unto itself.

The story opens in prologue, with Beck fresh off a flight from suburban Virginia, where she lives, to the Colorado Rockies, where Jericho is dying in the remote mountainside mansion he built for them during their 18-month affair: “On the Sunday before the terror began, Rebecca DeForde pointed the rental car into the sullen darkness of her distant past. . . . The road was curvy and unkempt and, in mid-April, icy in places. Still, Rebecca drove very fast, the way she always did. She did not know whether she was running away or running toward. . . . By Friday Rebecca DeForde would be running for her life.”

Carter has a good bit of fun with that sort of Saturday serial walk-off line, and another chapter ends: “The next day, she found the headless dog.”

He also indulges the taste for subtle literary allusion that has so delighted readers of his novels.

Thus, Jericho’s baronial house, Stone Heights, and the peaks that loom all around, brood over the story line in the fashion of Bronte’s and Hardy’s houses and landscapes. Similarly, biblical references abound. The closest town to Jericho’s home, for example, is Bethel; the narrative’s emotional subtext is illuminated by an introductory verse from the Book of Joshua: “And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand; and Joshua went unto him and said unto him, Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?”

Mysteries inside

Once Beck arrives, she finds Jericho attended only by his two daughters -- Audrey, who has abandoned both her husband and her career as a psychologist for life as an Episcopal nun, and Pamela, a Hollywood producer, who wears her ambition and avarice as naturally as her string of vintage pearls. An estranged son lurks problematically (perhaps malevolently) off-scene. One of this novel’s pleasures is Carter’s realization of the three female characters and their centrality to the action. It’s also one of the rare places where he seems to put a narrative foot amiss. Beck is a single mother to a young daughter, briefly married to an unscrupulous lawyer and now a mid-level executive in a dead-end job with a department store chain. Yet this is also the woman whose beauty and brilliance as a college student won the attention of the dashing ex-spook? The woman who now copes so resourcefully with an unfolding crisis of the most menacing sort? It just doesn’t wash. Whatever their inner torments and disappointments, women of Beck’s qualities don’t drift or “settle” in quite the way the author would have us believe.

That quibble aside, Beck soon has her hands full -- not only with Jericho’s resentful daughters but also with the old spooks, FBI agents and other dangerous characters who are convinced that the onetime spymaster has summoned her to impart a terrible secret (or secrets) with which he has long held them all at bay. Before she’s unraveled the enigma at the heart of this mystery, Beck will deal intimately with the line between sanity and madness -- a bigger factor in intelligence work than most people imagine -- and a cast of dubious characters. She’ll also come to grips with the realization that Jericho may not be the man she believed him to be.

To say more would spoil a plot rich in surprise and misdirection, though never of the illogical sort. Suffice to say that one key to this story is to keep in mind the fondness Jericho and pals have for what they call “wisps” -- facts or plausible stories created solely to mislead. Carter recently told an interviewer that he wrote this novel because he “wanted to try a short, straightforward page-turner. . . . Thrillers are fun to read, and, as I discovered, fun to write. If people like ‘Jericho’s Fall,’ I expect I will write more of them.”

One expects that he will.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com