A black pawn caught in a deadly chess match

Stephen Carter, a black law professor at Yale, understands the complex function of race in American culture. In 1991, he published "Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby," describing his conflicted attitude toward the policy that has helped and hindered black Americans like him. In these progressive times, it would be nice to imagine that color has nothing to do with our response to literature, but even the most colorblind readers will have trouble approaching "The Emperor of Ocean Park" without thinking of green.

This writer of social and legal commentary received a $4.2 million advance for his debut novel. But that's just the first unusual thing about his Grisham-esque story of a black law professor at a prestigious university who's caught in a thicket of intrigue and murder. It's an elephant – not just its size, but its strange collection of parts: It's a light thriller for the beach; a wicked satire of academic politics; a stinging exposé of the judicial confirmation process; a trenchant analysis of racial progress in America.

Carter can discuss the semiotics of legal diction and then end a chapter with corny cliffhangers like: "The Judge was murdered!" or "He hired a killer!" Imagine watching "Scooby Doo" while reading a thousand op-eds from the National Review.

No doubt his publisher, Knopf, hopes to have a "category buster" here, a book that appeals to so many demographic groups that it somehow returns their extraordinary advance. They're probably right. Carter has violated the Jim Crow laws of popular fiction (No academics allowed) and won everybody over.

The story opens at the funeral of Oliver Garland – the Judge, to everyone, including his three surviving children. We're to understand that this patriarch was a cross between Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork, a conservative black judge raised by Nixon, promoted by Reagan, and finally demolished by a brutal Senate confirmation.

Denied a seat on the Supreme Court, the Judge had retired to a partnership with a Washington law firm and made a fortune on the speaker's circuit. Talcott, the narrator, always found his father's politics something of an embarrassment, not so much because he was conservative but because he seemed to fan the self-satisfied piety and latent racism of his right-wing audiences.

Talcott barely has time to reflect on the Judge's death before trouble begins. At the grave site, his wealthy sister insists that she's going to track down their father's killer, though he died of a heart attack. Then a notorious gangster named Jack Ziegler emerges from the mist (really) to demand in his wheezy voice that Talcott tell him "the arrangements."

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