NEW ENGLAND WHITE is a murder mystery. In fact, it's two murder mysteries, one current day which is inextricably linked to another from thirty years prior. NEW ENGLAND WHITE is that...and so much more.

Lemaster and Julia Carlyle careen off a snowy road while returning home from a social event and discover the body of Julia's former lover, Kellen Zant, a highly sought after economics professor at the New England university where Lemaster is president and Julia serves as a divinity school dean. Somehow all of this connects to the Carlyle's teenage daughter, Vanessa. Something is desperately wrong with Vanessa, something more than usual adolescent angst. And it has to do with the thirty-year- old murder of Gina Joule, for which a young African- American male was hastily convicted and which Vanessa has been researching, as well as Kellen Zant.

When Julia starts asking questions, it seems a lot of people are interested in Gina's murder, many more than Julia imagines. As she searches for answers and begins to connect the dots, she finds a trail of clues left specifically for her by the deceased Zant. Their relationship predates her involvement with and subsequent marriage to Lemaster, but somehow everything is related— Gina's murder, Vanessa's psychological dysfunction, Kellen's murder, the current US presidential campaign involving two of Lemaster's former college roommates, and Lemaster's increasing authority in a secret society known as the Empyreals. Julia is willing to rip the covers off and expose all of the longheld secrets if it means saving her daughter's mental health. Her fragile relationship with Lemaster might even be destroyed in the process. It's a chance she's willing to take. But there are others who are of a different mindset, some who believe the past should stay in the past and others who will stop at nothing to influence the current presidential election. Hence, Julia finds herself in danger as she races to discover the truth about the deaths of both Gina Joule and Kellen Zant.

Stephen L. Carter examines racial attitudes towards African-Americans whose achievement and wealth places them in the upper stratosphere of American society, where they seemingly would rest above the many petty racial indignations that African-Americans of lesser status face. It also examines the racial attitudes of those upperclass Blacks towards each other and the people around them.

Some of the attitudes and behaviors revealed may seem surprising. A lot of them, to me, a middle-class African- American woman, are understandable. Race is the one thing that doesn't change, no matter how much money, status, or power one acquires. All of them remain a sad commentary on the degree to which race affects all of the lives of everyone, Black and white, from the custodian to the president of the United States.

The language of the book, I suspect, is as much Mr. Carter's as it is that of his characters. The talk is of university professors, upper echelon politics, and the like. It shines a light on a world of privilege, money, and status most will never know. Many folks never think of African-Americans having a place in this world, at least not prior to affirmative action taking hold, but we did, even if it remained a separate subset of this world all our own. I also suspect that much of what Mr. Carter describes in his fictional world is largely true today. It is in my world.

I got off to a slow start reading NEW ENGLAND WHITE—my fault entirely because my focus was elsewhere—but once I committed, I found the story to be a real page turner. Every scene raises another question for readers, forcing, if not daring, them to read on. By three-quarters of the way though this 500+ page tale, I couldn't put it down, determined to solve, as quickly as time would permit, both whodunits as well as the question of why.

The motivations of the murderers, at least of the modern day killer (no spoilers here), are still a bit fuzzy for me and thus, diminished my enjoyment just a hair. Overall, I found NEW ENGLAND WHITE to be an extremely well-written, highly entertaining tale, one that in today's highly charged racial and political environment certainly causes the reader to say, "What if...?"