Falling Leaves of Ivy

Melodrama mixes with murder in this banal first novel about Yalies on the rise in Manhattan. Kayo, Connor, Michelle and Elizabeth become best friends as undergraduates. Two of them are black: smart, ambitious Kayo, from Chicago's inner city, aims for a career in investment banking, while Michelle, a lit major from a family of Georgia preachers and schoolteachers, seeks a professorship. Connor, a white banking scion and alumni brat, struggles with econ grades while preparing for a job in the family firm, and Elizabeth, an aspiring journalist and daughter of a New Haven cop and an alcoholic mother, is a political activist. The cover-up of an accident in which they kill a bomeless man so strains their friendship that when one of them is murdered the following year in New York, the others are prime suspects. Joe uses wearisome clichds to explore such themes as corporate racism and the problems of interracial dating, meanwhile shifting the focus among her unappealing characters with formulaic regularity. (Nov.)