Stephen L. Carter’s first three novels are all sprawling, ponderous political thrillers, distinguished primarily by a legal scholar’s insight into the intricacies of upper-class African-American society. With his fourth, Jericho’s Fall, Carter turns his attention to another distinct American subculture—that of spies, counter-spies, and their respective masters. This time though, Carter’s perspective feels less first-hand, and more filtered through a lifetime of reading pulp fiction. Or maybe the problem is that actual CIA agents these days behave too much like movie characters.
Jericho’s Fall follows single mother Rebecca DeForde as she spends a week in the remote Colorado home of her sickly former lover, Jericho Ainsley, a master spook whose career ended due to the scandal surrounding his affair with DeForde. Ainsley is a fascinating character—opinionated, independent, and ruthless—but he’s largely relegated to the background of Jericho’s Fall while Carter covers DeForde’s antagonistic relationship with Ainsley’s two grown daughters. As DeForde handles a string of friendly and not-so-friendly visitors, all convinced she knows Ainsley’s most highly classified secrets, she also bickers with the Ainsley girls in conversations that come off as shrill and one-dimensional.
Jericho’s Fall is decidedly shorter than Carter’s earlier novels, and by the time it reaches its climax—propelled by chases, gunfights, and unexpected betrayals—it achieves the kind of page-turning momentum that Carter clearly intended. But until those last 50 pages, the book remains mired in its unspectacular mountaintop setting, and wedded to characters who spend most of their time firing accusations at each other and little time developing into, well, characters. Carter introduces some intriguing ideas about the fluid definition of “patriotism,” and how in the intelligence community, loyalty can be a liability, but the character best qualified to express those ideas spends the majority of the book lying weakly in bed. There’s a decent suspense novel hidden away in Jericho’s Fall, but Carter never finds the right secret drawer—mainly because he’s carrying the wrong key.