THE EMPEROR OF OCEAN PARK by Stephen L. Carter

This novel was published in 2002, but it’s about a Supreme Court nominee named Garland who is not confirmed.  How weird is that?  In this case, Judge Garland has just died of an apparent heart attack but has left a trail of loose ends for his daughter and two sons to tie up.  The youngest son and narrator is Talcott, a law professor at a fictional Ivy League university, whose wife Kimmer is up for a seat on the federal Court of Appeals.  This novel may be approaching 700 pages, but not one of them is dull.  The Garland family happens to be black, or, in the author’s words, members of the darker nation, as opposed to the paler nation.  There is enough intrigue, politics, and corruption to fill several Grisham novels, but the real mystery revolves around a chess puzzle.  You don’t have to be a chess player to follow the plot, but you do have to keep up with quite a few characters, including Talcott’s law school colleagues and students, his extended family and friends, and several shady characters, some of whom may also be colleagues, students, family, or friends.  From the day of the Judge’s burial forward, people have been asking Talcott about his father’s “arrangements,” and they obviously don’t mean funeral or financial arrangements.  Thus begins Talcott’s quest to find these arrangements, apparently documents, before he loses his job or his wife or both or worse.  I thoroughly enjoyed rummaging around in the closet of skeletons of the Garland family.  This novel is suspenseful and well-written with just the right amount of social commentary.  I didn’t even object to the sprinkling of religion, especially when the author claims that Satan is clever but not intelligent.  I could apply that assessment to one or two powerful humans as well.