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Eddie Wesley, a headstrong young black writer, has reached early fame by publishing a story in The Saturday Evening Post (in an era when publishing a short story was a way this could actually happen) and is now getting toasted by literary luminaries such as Langston Hughes, attending the good parties, and moving up the higher circles of what he calls the "darker nation."

Eddie is smart and stubborn, and now heartbroken and fuming that the woman he loves is marrying a rich man from an important family who believes the problem with democracy is that everyone is "entitled to a say."

Leaving the pre-wedding party, Eddie stumbles upon the dead body of a white lawyer. The corpse has an inverted cross on him, with an inscription that seems to read: "We Shall Overcome." Anonymously, Eddie alerts the authorities. As he veers between the roles of celebrated novelist and FBI informant, political danger and decades of family scandal dog him.

Palace Council, the third novel by Yale Law professor and public intellectual Stephen L. Carter, is about the secrets of important men. In this political thriller that moves from the 1950s to the 1970s, we see real characters of recent history owing one another big time and calling in favors. Richard Nixon nervously praises a man whose father gave him money to smear opponents. Joseph Kennedy relishes his Machiavellian ability to get information. J. Edgar Hoover makes threats from his dim library.

In the course of events, Eddie's beloved sister Junie, who happens to be pregnant and in a sticky academic situation, goes missing, and Eddie finds evidence that ties her to the dead man and a militant political group called Jewel Agony.

Palace Council puts a spooky angle over the barbershops and segregated hotels of Harlem by introducing a secret society that is based on Miltonic poetry, an obligation to providing male heirs, and the eventual goal of "shaking the throne" regardless of the dirty results.

In his investigations, wherein he will be tailed by a mysterious blond man and stand in dangerous proximity to assassination, Eddie is warned by an old friend that information about his sister and the inverted cross won't come easy: "Not to an outsider." And that Harlem is not a neighborhood but an idea. "You might even call it an ideology. A force. You can't mess around with it. It has a habit of messing back."

Disguised as page-turning summer reading that "confirms all the worst suspicions of the American left, and, at times, the right," Palace Council gives grim song to the secrets that men keep in the imperfect world they have inherited.

Roberto Ontiveros has published fiction in the Threepenny Review, the Santa Monica Review and the anthology Hecho en Tejas. He lives in New Braunfels.

Stephen L. Carter

(Knopf, $26.95)

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