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NEW ENGLAND WHITE
by Stephen L. Carter
Jonathan Cape, July 2007
576 pages
17.99 GBP
ISBN: 0224062891


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

I feel I should post a disclaimer before writing a review of this book. I do not live in the USA. The only knowledge I have of racial division in that country I have gleaned through reading, primarily fiction. The interaction between the races comprises a hefty chunk of the book which is written by a black Professor of Law at Yale University.

Julia Carlyle, wife of Lemaster Carlyle, the President of the university, is deputy dean of the School of Divinity in Elm Harbor. Their eldest daughter Vanessa is receiving psychiatric care because she has a tendency toward arson. Lemaster and Julia are driving home from a university do one night when they are forced to stop. They have seen the remains of a corpse that have been, well, interfered with by animals seeking a meal during the depths of winter.

To make matters worse, the victim, a lecturer in Economics, was once the lover of Julia – before she married Lemaster, of course. Kellen Zant was obsessed with Julia and had never stopped loving her or wishing he had not let her go. Now someone has murdered him and left him where Julia and her husband must be the people to discover his body.

Thirty years previously there had been another murder in the town. Gina Joule's drowned body had been discovered and the authorities of the time quickly decided the malefactor was a young black man. Julia's daughter, Vanessa, is writing a paper on the death – and Kellen Zant had taken an inordinate interest in both Vanessa and the paper.

Lemaster (or Lemmie as his intimates know him) is a friend of the President of the United States. Lemmie is also an official of a black secret society. Somehow, everything is connected to both the murders.

I would think the term murder mystery would be more appropriate for this work than the more common thriller. The only thrills I experienced come late in the book when Julia is investigating the university library. The mystery of the murders, while seemingly at the heart of the book, is less a part of the plot than is the topic of race.

The characterisations are well done and Julia and the rather stiff Lemmie are convincing, as is Vanessa and the officer responsible for the safety of the campus, Bruce Vallely.

I did find one of Carter's idiosyncratic expressions intensely annoying. He kept referring to "the darker nation" and "the paler nation." Surely to goodness the entire nation is an amalgamation of the two races? Apparently he used the same words in his first novel, THE EMPEROR OF OCEAN PARK (a work in which Julia and Lemaster appear as minor characters.) Perhaps the expression is intended as a euphemism but it strikes me as euphuistic rather than euphemistic. I wish he'd drop it.

Reviewed by Denise Pickles, August 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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