Palace Council » (Bargain)

Long before his spellbinding legal thriller The Emperor of Ocean Park, Stephen L. Carter's nonfiction titles helped shape the national debate on issues ranging from the role of religion in American political culture to the impact of integrity and civility on our daily lives.

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...

The Barnes & Noble Review

Like all ambitious conspiracy theorists, Stephen L. Carter is determined to graft his tale of dark secrets to the grand events of history. And the period over which Palace Council unfolds -- from the early 1950s until the Watergate scandal's dingy twilight -- provides rich material for the conspiracy-minded. Carter's third capacious thriller offers a protagonist who promises to make the most of this territory: Eddie Wesley, a young black writer of upright parentage who arrives in Harlem in 1954. Over the next 20 years he makes his reputation covering many of the era's landmark events for big-name magazines and weaving its turbulent social currents into several novels. Much like the Johnny-on-the-spot devil in that Rolling Stones song, it's the nature of Eddie's game to turn up wherever something big is afoot.