Article: Is It a Long Good Buy? Yale professor Stephen Carter got $4.2 million for his epic novel of suspense. The true mystery is why.('The Emperor of Ocean Park')

Byline: David Gates

In Jorge Luis Borges's tale "The Book of Sand," a bibliophile acquires an alarming volume with an infinite number of pages and no reachable beginning or end: "Several pages always lay between the cover and my hand. It was as if they grew from the very book." That's how it feels to read Stephen L. Carter's "The Emperor of Ocean Park," whose 657 pages could have been 257 if he'd just gotten on with his story of a law professor whose dead father, a sort of Robert Bork-Clarence Thomas-Abe Fortas composite, had a sinister secret. I've already forgotten not only the solutions to half the tedious mysteries Carter lugs around before unpacking ...

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