The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter (pp. 672)

A multi-layered conspiracy set among the black, judicial elite on the eastern seaboard. Talcott
Garland is a legal professor sucked into a strange pattern of events set in place by his late, disgraced judge/father who is looking for satisfaction related to the unsolved hit-and-run death of his daughter. Talcott must follow a trail of bizarre clues that supposedly only he could decipher while varied fronts attempt to find out what he’s discovered. The backdrop of his wife’s judicial nomination, a parade of extended family members, politics amongst colleagues from the university, and familial connections to shady powerful men puts a myriad of pieces in play. It often feels like reading a family tree.

The book is easier to tolerate once you start thinking of each character as a player in a game. So many chunks of secondary narrative are offered that it’s difficult to understand the author’s intention. The text, written by a renowned legal scholar, often rambles and feels like purposeful torture from the author. As a result, the story takes a good 200 pages to start moving in a reasonable pace.

There is a good portion of the book that’s worth reading. The chess theme, developed too late, is where more of the author’s focus should have been. Carbon copies of phrases, descriptive text, and sidestory feel like wasteful, annoying déjà vu. An overly laborious thread involving conversations between the main character and his 2-3 year old child was consistently grating. The inclusion of editorial commentary about the “darker nation” when most of the main players were from the “darker nation” felt seething , angry and out of place. As a novel, many of the segments felt like fictional self-therapy and should have been chopped.

I wanted to like this book more. The premise and thematic hook are better in concept than the author’s actual delivery of the written word. In the end, it was interesting but I would only recommend it someone who is a chess fan or someone willing to shovel through. Otherwise, this is just a really bad Richard North Patterson book with black main characters and novel chess theme written by a marketable Yale law professor.