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.
