The best way to reverse the steep and tragic decline in reading modern fiction — especially among men and traditional women abandoned by most of the big publishers — is to reward them with great novels. And few living authors have contributed more to the cause than Andrew Klavan. Who just did it again with his sublime new mystery thriller, Find Me Nowhere. It’s not only a suspenseful, intriguing detective story but a masterclass in literary fiction.
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Klavan’s protagonist, Cameron Winter, being a university English Lit professor is no mere plot convenience. It’s reflexive art. The author endowed his hero’s journey from killer spy to amateur sleuth to Romantic Poetry teacher to romancer himself with Shakespearean, Dickensian, Dostoyevskian, and Chandleresque touches. Yet his Winter novels also evoke a now less celebrated Raymond Chandler disciple, Ross Macdonald.
Winter, like Macdonald’s private-eye Lew Archer, consistently confronts psycho-sexual-moral dysfunction, often in the same family. The difference is that Winter, unlike Archer, has been tainted by the dysfunction. But Find Me Nowhere appears to literally close the book on this longstanding problem of his.
And Layla Tubman, an FBI femme-fatale so beautiful, she literally drives men crazy — as she would any editor-reader at a Big Five publisher.
The now mentally and spiritually whole Winter concludes his redemptive therapy over his government-assassin past with a senior psychiatrist who is secretly and madly in love with him. This B-story flashback thread, which ran through all six books, will likely be replaced — as it’s shared here — by Winter’s true love, Gwendolyn Lord, a conservative Christian child psychologist. If she lives that long. In Klavan land, you never know.
The new book mines Winter dealing with traditionalist courtship rituals like meeting Gwendolyn’s parents, and introducing her to his aloof yet spirit-crushing mother. Which is funny for a man who has frequently caused and escaped death. Klavan has long stated that a woman’s real power is motherhood, and the deprivation of it reduces badass Winter to a sulky child. He still finds time for the C story — probing the self-imposed exile of his old English professor guru, and a D story — unlocking the silence of a little boy patient of Gwendolyn’s.
But the main story is Klavan’s best in the series so far. At the behest of his enigmatic spy mentor, the Recruiter, Winter investigates the link between the explosive death of a U.S. Army sniper near Afghanistan and the knifing murder of his father in their economically dead Pennsylvania hometown. Even before he gets there, the town residents are trying to kill him.
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Klavan unfolds the mystery in both a Gothic and hardboiled style, with total expertise in each. As in the way he describes the essence of the literal ghost town: “He reached the main street, called Chamber Street. A more prosperous past seemed to linger along the lane as if half dreamed, not quite ghostly, not quite real.” And with the tough-guy dialogue. “Who came to you like you were a plastic clown and ordered himself a murder with a side of fries?” Lines don’t come any cooler and morally clearer than that.
As usual, Winter pieces the case together in an engrossing way. And the clues are fascinating. Such as the blown-up soldier’s devastated father watching a baseball game on TV which he always attended with his son, and declaring he just saw the son for an instant where they used to sit. The emotional impact makes you root for Winter to solve at least one murder, the father’s, if the son is still alive, both murders if he’s not.
And when Winter does solve the mystery, the denouement doesn’t take place in a cozy sitting room with all the suspects gathered together. It happens in a dark, eerie forest, with Winter moving between trees to avoid getting his head blown off while explaining his revelations to the killer. Which leads to one of the most satisfying twists ever in a detective story.
Typically for a Klavan novel, all the characters are fascinating. These include the new ones — a cherubic smiling town gangster, his zombified henchmen, a psychotic gorilla FBI agent, and various witnesses such as the dead or undead soldier’s haunted veteran friend. And the series regulars — the Recruiter, whose uncanny appearances and disappearances confound even his keen trainee Winter — and master of disguise fed Stan “Stan-Stan” Stankowski, who doesn’t take on a role but inhabits it to the point of physical size alteration.
But other than Winter, it’s the women who rule in Klavan’s work, and nobody writes them better or stronger, especially the feminist empowerers who would balk at his. This again goes for the series cast of characters — Winter-lovesick old psychiatrist Margaret Whitaker, sweet yet sharp new love Gwendolyn Lord, and Dean of Student Relations Lori Lesser, obsessed with either getting Winter fired for woke violations or into her bed, then fired. Lori is off-page this book but her influence and agenda loom large in the plot.
Add to them, Aurora Dumont, the spitfire who vowed to marry the town dope if her boyfriend — the supposedly dead soldier — didn’t enlist to escape their life trap, even knowing once he did, he’d never come back to her. And Layla Tubman, an FBI femme-fatale so beautiful, she literally drives men crazy — as she would any editor-reader at a Big Five publisher. Fortunately, Mysterious Press, Klavan’s publisher, has no such qualm. And it’s readers who will reap the benefit, hopefully in increasing numbers.
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