Rating: 
Summary: Too much rambling......
Review: not enough cloak and dagger. This story has great potential but I found that it is too bogged down with an overload of minutia that is a detraction. The mystery itself could have been very engrossing if one didn't have to wade through all of the dissertations that added nothing. The book is over 600 pages. The story could easily have been told in half that amount.
Rating: 
Summary: Not bad
Review: Overall the book wasn`t bad. It was a bit drawn out without good reason I thought which frustrated me a little. Also I thought the ending was a little anti-climactic.
Rating:
Summary: Where was the editor?
Review: Within the first dozen pages of this bloated novel I was wondering if there was an editor that was brave enough to tell Mr. Carter that this book needed to be pared down.Too many repeated thoughts, too many unnecessary details. This book should be a must read for every aspiring mystery writer as to what NOT to do when writing a mystery novel! DON'T make it wordy, DON'T bring in characters that are minor yet you flesh them out in long lengthy detail and DON'T feel the need to describe rooms the characters are in down the way the curtains look! What was Stephan Carter thinking? This was not one of his law school class lectures- this was a murder mystery novel! We also get the ideal you know a lot of big words- a LOT of them. The only reason I finished the book was my determination I would not allow it to defeat me. This was one tough, grueling read when the purpose of reading is to enlighten, entertain and relax. I felt very little enlightenment, the entertainment was below par and I was too aggravated by Mr. Carter's lecturing style of writing to relax so I could enjoy the book. And the characters? I defy anyone to find any positive characteristics of any character in this book. This book was an obvious success so my negative review won't amount to much. I believe he is due to deliver his next novel next year- I am hoping his editor and publisher have taken him aside and warned him another 670-plus page mystery will not necessarily fly no matter how many big time mystery authors praise it (which a few share the same agent as Carter does).
Rating: 
Summary: Best I've read in the past 10 years
Review: Fantastic - Stimulating - Original
This from a member of the not quite white world.
Rating:
Summary: AN AMAZINGLY INTELLIGENT THRILLER
Review: This is quite possibly one of the best books I have ever read. This is saying quite a lot since I spend as much time as I can reading! To use a favorite expression of the author, Stephen Carter, this book is "astonishing". Some of the reviewers complained that the book was too long, but I found myself wishing it had been longer. It is one of those books that slowly but inexorably draws the reader in, rather like a fly in a spider web. The book starts out with the protagonist, Talcott (or Misha as he is often referred to), being a middle-class Afican American, married, one son, and a career as a law professor at a prestigious University, a fairly mundane, normal existence. However, without even being aware of exactly what is happening, we, along with Misha, find life has turned upside down and sideways. All we know is that Misha's father, a disgraced judge, has died, and left behind a convoluted "arrangement" which Misha must unravel if his life is ever to return to something resembling normalcy. It's not unlike Alice's tumble down the rabbit hole in "Alice in Wonderland", and the surrealistic events that follow held me for the entire length of the book. This is not a fast action, quick thriller, nor is for the "weekend warrior" reader, and is not for everyone. But for those who like their stories cerebral and intelligent (much of the plot is compared to complex chess plays, which I don't pretend to understand!) will have a hard time putting this book down. I hope Mr. Carter is working on another book! This was a mind-blowing and thoroughly compelling experience.
Rating: 
Summary: Boring - where's the story.
Review: I don't mind long books, but this one was way to long. The story only took up part of each chapter and the rest was filler, filler that was often repeated. The constant reference to race was tedious. Who cares, in a (fictional) book it is not important. At about 250 pages I gave up.
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Summary: The Emperor of Ocean Park: Form in Need of Substance
Review: Hungry for a good, solid and literate mystery, I was initially thrilled to find THE EMPEROR OF OCEAN PARK in one of the bigger bookstores in Makati. From the synopsis and the ecstatic reviews, Stephen Carter's story seemed to have all the vital ingredients: lots of diverse and complex characters, a plot that involved more than one subtext, political, social and racial issues, and the promise of a satisfying climax. Despite Mr. Carter's impressive professional credentials and a host of characters with formidable talents and accomplishments, the center of this story just doesn't hold, or rather the mystery which is meant to drive the novel becomes more and more attentuated. Although the author manages to maintain a degree of plausibility thanks to a well defined hero in Talcott Garland, the same can't be said of Garland's adversaries. They struck me as barely credible, perhaps because their motivation like their complicity needed far more development and clarity. Instead of finding the story impossible to put down, I found myself fighting the urge not to skim the last 100 pages. There is Carter's excellent depiction of academia,its peculiar cast of characters, its rivalries and duplicity, and his penetrating study of a marriage that was never meant to be, but they were not enough to make me care about the resolution. As an aside, at first the author's referring to the "darker nation" and the "paler nation" struck me as arresting and original (I am not sure if it is original with him, a superb way of really debunking racial stereotyping.). But after awhile, this way of differentiating one character from another grew rather predictable and seemed to fall into another category of stereotyping. I wanted to say: Who Cares? Just get on with the story and let us discover who is who through his or her thoughts, action and speech as any good novel or play requires.
Rating:
Summary: A bloated book with unlikeable characters
Review: I read this because my book club picked it. It was torture. Where was the editor? There isn't a single character I cared about and the "mystery" was utterly contrived. Carter's literary style was terrible. Perhaps if it would have been written in the third person it may have worked better. He constantly attributed thoughts and motives to people as if he were a third person narrator instead of a person witnessing an act, e.g. a third person narration can say, "He didn't like the gift because it reminded him of his father," but a first person narrator can't know that unless told directly. That is the point--you look at events through a filter. I really disliked this book. I could go on and on and on and on and on and on and... until I fill 650+ pages like Carter did but I won't.
Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic....Classic at end
Review: The Emperor of Ocean Park, did re-new my spark in legal thrillers...the scences, the descriptions were top rate, to say the least...however, as what appears to have become part of contemporary literatry, the ending was plain and suspect. I recomend this book to everyone, however realise it is Prof. Carter's first fiction novel and the cob-webs of teaching at Yale are still present.
Rating:
Summary: Truly Awesome
Review: Some years ago I read "Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby" by Stephen L. Carter. It's a memoir and an opinion piece, discussing how Affirmative Action influenced his life (he got into school because of it) and how it has influenced our culture and society since then. The book concludes that Affirmative Action should now end, because there are enough opportunities for everyone to succeed, even poor black people. It's an interesting book. In the years since, Carter has made a name for himself writing opinion pieces on the political discourse in the nation. None of them precisely engage a particular political figure: rather, they all tackle a subject, and render the author's verdict on the situation. Carter self-identifies as a liberal, but actually ranks with Shelby Steele, Tammy Bruce, and Christina Hoff Sommers, as a liberal who's listened to by conservatives much more than by people on their side of the aisle. He's more prolific than Steele, less polemic than Bruce, and probably closest to Sommers in tone and thoughtfulness. Now he's turned to writing fiction, and the transformation is marvelous. This book is billed as a 600+ page suspense novel. This is true, but somewhat deceptive. Although there are chase scenes, shootouts, murders, surprises, and mystery galore in this story, there is so much more that's not part of the normal mystery/suspense genre that it would be patently unfair to talk on just that level. First, the picture of the upper middle-class blacks, living in "the Gold Coast" in Washington D.C., and in their own neighborhood on Martha's Vineyard, is wonderfully rendered and pretty much unique in American fiction. Second, there's an amazing cast of characters here, from the narrator, Talcott Garland, a law professor who teaches at a university suspiciously similar to Yale, where the author himself teaches. He has a large family, full of siblings, parents, and cousins, all with diverse and interesting personalities, and each with their part to play in the story. There are also colleagues, friends, and competitors of Garland and his wife, and each of them, too, is wonderfully rendered, from a lesbian colleague to a Supreme Court Justice who's a friend of the family to an old law partner of Talcott's father. And lastly there's the cast of conspirators, many of whom remain mysterious throughout the book. Some are good, some bad, some you're not so sure about, some you never really find out. Next, the author does a wonderful job of rendering the setting that the characters populate. Someone picking up the book and seeing it is 600+ pages in length might imagine that there's a lot of plot here, to fill those pages, a sort of Ludlum-with-lawyers. Actually, while there is a good deal of plot, it's not on that level at all. Instead, there are marvelous descriptions of everywhere the narrator goes, from Martha's Vineyard to D.C. to the university town where he teaches. Descriptions of what the characters eat, where they go, who they see, etc., are everywhere in the book, and wonderfully done. You get the feeling you've been there by the time you're done with the book. I will tell you nothing of the plot, as some of the other reviewers have done, because I don't want to spoil it for you. Suffice it to say that Talcott (the narrator) has been charged with unravelling a secret that his recently dead father has left for only him to find. There are others, however, who either want the secret found, or want it destroyed. This makes for a wonderful puzzle, and an amazing story. I can't recommend this book highly enough, and hope everyone reads it.
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