Upper-crust thriller is a tad overcooked

ON a recent European vacation, I overheard some locals asking our traveling companions what my husband and I did for a living. They professed surprise at the responses, given all that they knew of African Americans were the gangbangers and athletes they saw via the U.S. media. Guess they hadn’t heard about the Huxtables, we joked at the time, not without a bit of rancor on my part born of suffering under the common assumption there is only one, monolithic “black community.”

For that reason alone, Stephen L. Carter’s densely populated literary thrillers are refreshing. Set among the well-educated, upwardly mobile members of what W.E.B. Du Bois a century ago called the “Talented Tenth,” Carter’s first novel, 2002’s “The Emperor of Ocean Park,” teemed with accomplished attorneys and professors, high-powered judges and captains of industry -- all members of what has come to be called the African American elite, a group glittering yet grasping enough to give Scott Turow’s or John Grisham’s villains a run for their money.

Arguably, Carter brings an academic’s background to his thrillers, more akin to Turow’s than Grisham’s. The conservative professor at Yale’s law school is the author of seven successful works of nonfiction that explore topics as wide-ranging as integrity, civility, affirmative action and religion in politics.

So, amid reports of a $4-million advance, “Emperor” was published with considerable fanfare and wide critical acclaim, including comparisons to Turow and the imprimatur of Grisham, who recommended the novel as the inaugural pick for the “Today” show’s book club. “Emperor” was also a literal monster of a read -- well over 600 pages -- that might have benefited from an editor possessed of a sharper pencil.

Carter was certainly not the first novelist to cover the world of African American privilege, but his impeccable Ivy League credentials and penchant for describing that world’s myriad details gave readers a frisson of excitement as they peeked into the black elite’s boudoirs and ballrooms in a more dramatic fashion than had been presented in such sober nonfiction books as Lawrence Otis Graham’s “Our Kind of People” or David Dent’s “In Search of Black America.”

Now comes Carter’s “New England White,” set again in fictional Elm Harbor, where Lemaster Carlyle, a Barbadian immigrant, has just become the first black president of his prestigious university. Lemaster and his wife, Julia, two minor characters from “Emperor,” also rule a social circle, ironically named the Clan, “the heavily fortified borders of which, once upon a time, [Julia’s] Granny Vee and her buddies diligently patrolled, lest the wrong sort of Negroes force their way in.”

A former White House counsel, the suave yet donnish Lemaster is a member of a staid Harlem men’s club, the Empyreals, and a university alumnus who counts among his close friends and former roommates the president of the United States and a liberal senator who is making his own run for the White House. Julia, a deputy dean at the university’s divinity school, is beholden to her husband not only for continuing to provide her with the lifestyle to which her mother had made her accustomed in New Hampshire, but also for indulging her ill humor and social ineptitude when dealing with his eight-figure donors.

Rather than feting “shadowy alumni, one or two facing indictment, whose only virtue was piles of money,” Julia would clearly rather spend time with members of the Ladybugs, a black elite social club reminiscent of the real-life Girl Friends or Links, counseling her students at the divinity school or being involved in the lives of her children, most notably 17-year-old Vanessa who had, nine months before, set fire to the family’s Mercedes.

Knowing this last bit, readers will be forgiven for fearing all the Carlyles are automotively challenged when, driving their Escalade in a snowstorm one November evening to pick up Vanessa, Lemaster takes a beloved shortcut, resulting in a skidding accident that, among other things, puts the couple within a few feet of the bullet-riddled body of Kellen Zant, an African American and popular economics professor at the university who was also a well-paid consultant to various and sundry corporations. Kellen, we learn, was also the former lover of Julia, with whom he had a tempestuous and obsessive relationship as an undergraduate and for whom he evidently still carried a torch.

When the police learn of Julia’s once and maybe not-so-former connection to Kellen, she and her husband come under some suspicion. But when Julia learns from a colleague at the divinity school that Kellen had angered several people in nearby Tyler’s Landing and later discovers he had left cryptic messages and clues in gifts for her all over the country, she begins to nose around on her own. Her snooping annoys the townsfolk, as well as a shady telelawyer and certain individuals at the university, especially after the official investigation is mysteriously closed a few days after the murder, the killing chalked up by police to a robbery gone bad, the perpetrator in the wind and, incredibly, presumed not worth pursuing.

Although the driven amateur is not a new convention in crime fiction, and Julia’s perspective as a member of the black elite is fascinating, she seems, at first blush, to be a problematic protagonist. She wallows in her past relationship with Kellen for far too many pages, and her understandable concern for her daughter, who seems obsessed with the fate of a white teenager killed in town some 20 years before, grows wearisome. Moreover, Julia’s observations of Ladybugs and Empyreals are so rambling that they threaten to derail the reader’s attention from important plot points. And there’s a lot of plot, so much that readers may need an organizational chart to keep track of the various and nefarious people and connections presented.

It’s a relief when Carter introduces Bruce Vallely, widower of Ladybug club member Grace Vallely and director of campus safety. A former detective and, conveniently, a veteran of the Army’s special forces, Bruce reports to a fussy university administrator who seems to have an inordinate interest in protecting moneyed alumni not unlike Lemaster’s powerful former roommates. After some protracted plot machinations, in which Carter manages to set up Bruce to pursue the case on his own, “New England White” finds its loping stride as an intellectual, wordy, character-laden thriller -- but a thriller nonetheless.

And it is on that level that “New England White” fails to satisfy, not because of its length (Caleb Carr’s “The Alienist” and Iain Pears’ “An Instance of the Fingerpost” come to mind) or the complex conspiracy at its heart, but because of the heavy-handed plotting and deductive leaps of faith the novel asks of readers that become hard to stomach. That said, one must acknowledge that Carter is a thoughtful writer whose wide-ranging intelligence and insights traverse terrain that encompasses campus intrigue, economic theory, political dirty tricks, religion, antique mirrors, anagrams and more. Notably, his dissection of the black elite and the hidebound traditions that both define and obsess them are astutely observed and just biting enough to be entertaining.

But for all of “New England White’s” virtues, one wishes, as one did with Carter’s first novel, for that discerning editor who could hone this diamond in the rough into the sparkler lurking inside.

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Paula L. Woods, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, is the author of the Det. Charlotte Justice novels, including, most recently, “Strange Bedfellows.”