NEW ENGLAND WHITE by Stephen L. Carter

I didn’t like this book as well as his first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, partly because the formula was pretty much the same.  We’re still in a New England college town, where Lemaster Carlyle is the president of the college.  His wife Julia is a dean in the divinity school, and she is the main character.  The Carlyles are black, although all of their neighbors are white.  Their teenage daughter Vanessa is having behavioral problems and seeing a psychiatrist.  She is obsessed with the murder of Gina Joule, a teenager who was murdered in the community years ago.  Meanwhile, Julia’s ex-lover Kellen Zant has been murdered, and he too seems to have been trying to find out who really killed Gina Joule.   Kellen has left Julia a slew of obscure clues, and she embarks on a dangerous scavenger hunt to discover what Kellen was up to and who killed him.  The plot is a little too convoluted, and the author keeps us (and Julia) guessing about the intentions of the secondary characters, such as the campus security chief and a writer whom Julia meets at Kellen’s funeral.  Nagging at Julia throughout the novel is her suspicion that her husband may have been involved in Gina’s murder while he was in college, or at least in a cover-up.  I actually got a little tired of Julia and her class consciousness, but what really annoyed me was that she seemed to leave a lot of conversations unfinished.  For example, at one point her husband is talking about something that happened with one of his three roommates in college, but he doesn’t tell her which one.  Obviously, he wants to keep that person’s identity a secret, but it’s not obvious that Julia even asks.  This same scenario happens several times, where Julia obtains incomplete information but doesn’t press for the full story.  I think this failing is more the author’s fault than the character’s, because Julia certainly comes across as being very thorough and leaving no stone unturned in her quest for the truth.