Summary: The son of a judge investigates his death.
Very often during the summer I get way behind on writing about the books I read. My kids are home, I do stuff with them, I still have to get some work done, we travel, etc. I finished The Emperor of Ocean Park about a month ago but I have just not made time to write about it. I have known of the book for years but I have never made time to read it. This year I have been trying to keep more fiction in my reading diet and trying to read books that I already owned and decided now was the time to actually start reading this one.
I alternated between audio and kindle versions, but mostly read the book. The audio was well done, but it felt like it was just too slow to listen instead of read. This is not a fast book and it is quite long, so I think that also contributed to me mostly reading it.
The rough story is that Talcott Garland, a law professor at a fictional ivy league school, has to investigate his father’s death. His father was a famous judge in conservative circles. He was nominated to the Supreme Court, but had to resign from the nomination as a result of a connection with his friend. That left him embittered and more connected to the conspiracy theory aspects of the conservative world.
Stephen L Carter is a lawyer and law professor at Yale in real life. His grandmother was an influential lawyer in her own right, but this is a book of fiction. That being said, I think part of what makes this book compelling is that it explores racial realities in the upper reaches of society. The characters are Supreme Court justices, and presidents, and influential lawyers and professors and business people. But race does still influence the way the world works.
This is a well-written slow-burn mystery. The people around Talcott need him to figure out what is going on, but it is unclear if it is the good guys, or the bad guys want him to solve the mystery. There are clearly a couple different groups that are vying for information. And there are personal issues as well. Part of what I enjoyed about the book is that while this isn’t a “Christian” novel, it is a novel that takes faith aspects of Black culture seriously.
I did not know until I started writing this post that this was made into a 10 episode TV series. I have not watched that and it is not currently playing on anything that I am subscribed to, but I will look forward to watching it in the future. This is the first book of a trilogy. The trilogy is not about the same characters, but it is set in the same fictional world. I read about 1/3 of the second book, but it didn’t engage me nearly as much as the first book did. I will come back to it later, but because it does not seem to be directly tied to the first book’s characters, I think I can come back to it later without any loss.