By Andrew Klavan
(Mysterious Press, 312 pages, $24.26)
A sad drawback in what passes for art today is that too many “artists” are less perceptive than the perceivers. The bar for film and literature has fallen well below the enlightenment level of the public. Great books use plot, characters, and style — all three in serious decline — to impart truth and wisdom, or at least psychological insight. The detective novel has been a keeper of the flame ever since the very first (incidental) one, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, introduced private investigator Bucket.
Though the house murders are the creepy main attraction, Winter’s adventures in academia are profoundly entertaining.
We read superior mysteries not simply to find out whodunit but whydunit. To enter a universe where crime makes sense, and the crime solver can make sense of it based on his or her uniquity for the task. And this is something the new Andrew Klavan novel featuring Cameron Winter, The House of Love and Death, richly provides. (READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: Beauty Is Truth Against Woke Fantasy)
One winter night in a rich suburb of Chicago, Maidenvale, four people were shot to death in their home: successful psychologist Norman Wasserman, wife Marion, 16-year-old daughter Lila, and lovely nanny Agnes Wilde. A lesser writer would have courted cliché by depicting or describing the murders. Klavan fascinatingly reveals the victims post-massacre through the perspective of a fireman trying to salvage the burning house.
The firefighters also discover the lone survivor of the home executions — the Wasserman son, Bobby, seven years old. He had been lowered from his third-floor bedroom window by the nanny, Agnes. Why she did not conveniently follow him to safety while a killer terrorized the house is a mystery that intrigues former spy turned college Romantic Poetry professor Cameron Winter — and through him us.
Investigating the murders, Winter soon finds himself in a morally compromised town. The recent influx of Latino immigrants and the criminal element among them has corrupted Maidenvale, most threateningly the ominous police chief, Inspector Strange. Winter has to uncover information while skirting danger from both sides of the law.
Luckily, he finds four compelling female allies: a lesbian security officer, an incorrupt policewoman, dead girl Lila’s beautiful best friend, and a fetching community center counselor. And Klavan writes believable women like few authors today, especially women. Not for him the modern art canard that a strong woman means being a physical rather than sexual match for men.
In fact, feminists would deplore Klavan’s feminine yet forceful exemplars of the fair sex minus any misogyny or misandry. Yet they could never equal his distinctive hard-boiled poetry: “He wished he could see everything the way he saw women — and yes, pretty women especially. He wished he could see trees and sunsets and wispy clouds and litter blowing down the street with the same complete, rapt focus of concentration that women could produce in him simply by being themselves.”
The women help Winter perilously recreate the salient background of the death house. About psychologist Wasserman’s lechery for young girls (“If eyes were fingers, he’d have stripped me naked,” his daughter’s friend tells Winter). About Lila’s romance with chivalrous Mexican high school soccer star Mateo. About Mateo’s father’s struggle with the local drug lord. And more about the nanny, Agnes Wilde, as the possible key to the horror.
In one of the most original scenes in detective fiction history, Winter enters a fantasy video game that Mateo and Lila played. Observing their undead avatars, he ponders the bizarre virtual afterlife. “It was odd – eerie — to watch them there, talking, engaged with each other, and with life, knowing they were ghosts, they were gone.” The appearance of the game’s knightly villain leads Winter to an exciting late revelation and confrontation. (READ MORE: The Woke Choice Is Always the Wrong Choice)
As in the last superb Cameron Winter book, A Strange Habit of Mind, you get two gripping suspense tales for the price of one — the present case and a flashback to Winter’s Le Carré-esque past, as told to his 60-something female therapist, Margaret. Her gender is important since Margaret is secretly in love with Winter.
The back story here concerns Winter going undercover as a college student to flush out a Chinese computer spy on campus at the risk to a vulnerable coed who falls for him and vice versa. He begins his tale with the irresistible line, “I’m going to tell you the worst thing I ever did.” Klavan of course ties the two narratives together in developing Winter’s persona.
He also delightfully brought back three fun recurring characters: feminist-fatale Lori Lesser, dean of student relations, whose obsession with the woke-defying Winter is matched by her attraction to him; undercover fed Stan Stankowski, a master of disguise who loses himself in every role; and the Recruiter, the hard-ass black patriot that berates Winter for soullessness while paternally guiding him through his missions.
Though the house murders are the creepy main attraction, Winter’s adventures in academia are profoundly entertaining, primarily those involving Lori Lesser. Like Gladys Kravitz in the old Bewitched series, Lori can’t understand how Winter keeps surviving expositions that would cancel any other professor. In this book, Winter has to save Lori’s neck while hiding his true nature from her.
The college setting also lets Klavan seamlessly reflect on the poor state of higher learning “full of undergraduates — slouching, sullen undergraduates so ignorant, that they thought they knew something.” Reading good books like The House of Love and Death might teach them something about great writing.
Looking for an endearing holiday gift book? Try my romantic Christmas ghost story, The Christmas Spirit, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine bookstores.