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    Palace Council
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    Palace Council
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    Palace Council
    Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

    Palace Council

    Written by Stephen L. Carter

    Narrated by Dominic Hoffman

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    "Carter twists plotlines like pretzels while wryly skewering America's wealthy intellectual elite."-People

    John Grisham called Stephen L. Carter's first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, "beautifully written and cleverly plotted. A rich, complex family saga, one deftly woven through a fine legal thriller." The Chicago Tribune hailed Carter's next book, New England White, as "a whodunit with conscience." Now this bestselling novelist returns with an electrifying political thriller set in the turbulent era of Watergate and Vietnam, giving us one of the most riveting and naked portraits of Nixon ever written.

    In the summer of 1952, twenty prominent men gather at a secret meeting on Martha's Vineyard and devise a plot to manipulate the President of the United States. Soon after, the body of one of these men is found by Eddie Wesley, Harlem's rising literary star. When Eddie's younger sister mysteriously disappears, Eddie and the woman he loves, Aurelia Treene, are pulled into what becomes a twenty-year search for the truth. As Eddie and Aurelia uncover layer upon layer of intrigue, their odyssey takes them from the wealthy drawing rooms of New York through the shady corners of radical politics, all the way to the Oval Office.

    Stephen Carter's novel is as complex as it is suspenseful, and with his unique ability to turn stereotypes inside out, Palace Council is certain to enthrall listeners to the very last moment.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJul 8, 2008
    ISBN9780739343418
    Unavailable
    Palace Council
    Author

    Stephen L. Carter

    Stephen L. Carter is the bestselling author of several novels—including The Emperor of Ocean Park and New England White—and over half a dozen works of non-fiction. Formerly a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, he is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University, where he has taught for more than thirty years. He and his wife live in Connecticut.

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    Reviews for Palace Council

    3.5/5

    144 ratings11 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I had been waiting to read this book for a number of years now. It's my first audio book. I liked most of the story. I was definitely unhappy with the ending and disappointed. I would have liked to have seen more closure to some of the characters. Otherwise, great writing.
    • 3/5
      Antoher of Carter's literate, erudite, elegant, but occasionally pompous novels of upper-crust African American life, nicely teamed with a Grisham-like suspense plot. Julia becomes inadvertantly involved with the murder of a former lover and the long-ago death of a young girl. The book drags a bit for the first third, but then the plot complications pick up and if flies along. A fine book somewhat spoiled by an ending that seems to be completely from left field.
    • 3/5
      600 pages for a murder mystery is too much. Even name of the rose was 500 pages and that had so many other major elements to develop. So I got up to page 147 and then skipped to the end. Too much on While there were ivery interesting details about the life and mores of upper eschelon black Americans, I was left yawning with Julias constant vacillations and internal conflicts. About 300 pages less and trhis would have been en point.
    • 5/5
      When Professor Kellen Zant is found murdered, a decades old mystery is resurrected. It involves the President of a university and his family who were socially related. Very good depiction by a black author of a successful black family in a upper class white community . Not a quick read, but hard to put down.
    • 3/5
      First off, this is a very large book. I wasn't sure I'll be able to get through it but I did. This book is a murder mystery surrounding an African-American president of a university, his wife, her dead ex-lover and a crime that happened over 30 years ago and how they are connected to it. It was a difficult read at first. Many characters and situations to remember but once I understood what was going on within the story, I swept through it. I wanted to know how it was going to end. The ending was a bit of a letdown, however. It was not what I was expecting at all. I wanted something more. I know that the author is a law professor at an Ivy League school so the book was a bit wordy to say the least. I get it. The guy is smart, probably smarter than the rest of us. Maybe I should have started with his first book then I would have been prepared for his writing style.
    • 3/5
      Antoher of Carter's literate, erudite, elegant, but occasionally pompous novels of upper-crust African American life, nicely teamed with a Grisham-like suspense plot. Julia becomes inadvertantly involved with the murder of a former lover and the long-ago death of a young girl. The book drags a bit for the first third, but then the plot complications pick up and if flies along. A fine book somewhat spoiled by an ending that seems to be completely from left field.
    • 4/5
      An odd mix of compelling and cold. A month on and I can barely remember the resolution to the central mystery, but certain scenes and turns of phrase jump up to be recalled.
    • 4/5
      Conspiracies make for great fiction and that’s what at the heart of this mystery. Someone is covering up a 30-year-old murder, but it’s a fresh murder that spurs Julia into action. Like the hero of The Emperor of Ocean Park, Julia is a reluctant sleuth. She is drawn ever deeper into the mystery by clues only she can interpret and string together for a conclusion. The people she trusts are few; not even her own husband.Julia’s ex-boyfriend Kellen Zant is the latest victim; murdered to keep him from revealing the previous killer. Is it the President of the US or just a Senator from a New England state? Maybe it’s Lemaster himself since he was roommate to both men in college. Along the way she meets suspicious townies, gossipy Sister Ladies, vicious dogs, corrupt lawyers and closed ranks of the rich and powerful.Once again, there is an element of race, but no axe grinding away and no preaching. Again, these black folks are living in a most white area of the country; New England. They are accepted, but is it only because of guilt? Oh that lovely white guilt. But again, the racism cuts both ways and we have again the attitude of divisiveness for the sake of divisiveness on the part of many of the black characters in this novel. Racial harmony will not come easily until both sides are willing to cut the crap. Full of interesting characters, this was a much more tightly plotted novel than the previous one. Julia’s motivations were shown and not tied up in a bunch of internal monologues and angst and I understood her more for it. It was much less an internal novel and much more external and once things started moving, they didn’t let up. An nice long story arc with a satisfying ending.
    • 5/5
      Brilliantly plotted and written. Very enjoyable. Moving
    • 3/5
      Stephen Carter explores the world of the Carlyles, an upper-middle class African-American family, and their place in an Ivy-League type setting. This is a familiar theme to Carter who wrote about a similar dynamic in his previous novel The Emperor of Ocean Park. The Carlyle family is entangled with a decades-old mystery that is somehow related to the recent murder of a university colleague. In the discovery process, the reader is introduced to a social networking system amongst wealthy African-Americans that appears to be secretive to most of the country's general population.Although Carter attempts to try to enlighten the reader with many examples that differentiate this group from others, the reality is that it appears minutely different from any other privileged class that functions in the Ivy-League world. In this regard, the novel rehashes familiar themes of privilege, abuse of power, and the fall-out from a have and have-not dichotomous society. The framework that Carter creates for the murder-mystery is presented as a tightly interwoven series of puzzles that must be solved by a teamwork of people, particularly Julia Carlyle. Initially, the riddles are complex and reveal key plot elements. As the story unfolds, they are larger gaps between the clues and how the connections are drawn amongst the details of the dual murders. As the reader nears the conclusion of the novel, the pace picks up so quickly that it doesn't reflect the attention to detail that is present at the beginning. This book is an enjoyable read as a suspense novel but it is not the social commentary that it has been touted as being.
    • 5/5
      Set in the university town of of New Englands's Elm Harbor where a murder threatens to reveal the racial complications of the town's past, the secreats of a prominent family, and the most hidden bastions of African-American political influence. The story of Lemaster and Julia Carlyle-he the university president and she his wife.