The Faculty Club

Rich Orlow’s youthful voice is a good fit for protagonist Jeremy Davis, a first year law school student at an unnamed “greatest law school in the world,” though he makes no allowance for any accent that a native of a small Texas town, like Davis, might display. Still, he easily takes the listener through the first half of this debut thriller swiftly and stylishly as its young hero struggles with his studies, debates, and romance while relishing the opportunity of getting tapped to the Ivy League university’s elite secret club. The club, the source of the novel’s mystery, is initially as beguiling for the listener as it is for Jeremy, who is willing to bend his moral code to the breaking point to get in. But when the club’s mystery slides into mysticism and bizarre fantasy, there’s little any narrator could do to raise the material above its much-too-familiar pulp horror level. An Atria hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 22). (June)