A large, stirring novel of suspense that is, at the same time, a work of brilliantly astute social observation. Set in two privileged worlds, the upper crust African American society of the eastern seaboard and the inner circle of an Ivy League law school, it tells the story of a complex family with a single, seductive link to the shadowlands of crime. Judge Oliver Garland has just died suddenly. A brilliant legal mind, conservative and famously controversial,...

She was black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s-and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted. When special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey selected twenty lawyers to help him clean up the citys underworld, she was the only member of his...