Andrew Klavan’s After That, The Dark: The Best Cameron Winter Book Yet

After That, The Dark is the fifth novel in Andrew Klavan’s Cameron Winter series, and it is the best one so far. Cameron Winter is a very interesting character who has shown more and more depth to his personality as the series has progressed. He is a former “black ops” agent who is still intensely loyal to his former commander, the Recruiter. However, the Recruiter has had to go underground, due to political pressure that has been fomented by the ultra-wealthy tech mogul, Thaddeus Blatt. For the first time, there are cracks in Winter’s unquestioning trust in the one person who gave his life meaning.

Winter is currently employed as a professor of English Romantic poetry at a small college outside of Washington, D.C., but he manages to get embroiled in various murders that seem open and shut cases until he starts asking uncomfortable questions. In After That, The Dark, the murder in question is brought up by Gwendolyn Lord, a therapist he met in the third book, The House of Love and Death. He was immediately attracted to her, but it took him quite a while to screw up the courage to ask her out. While they are on their first date, she mentions an “impossible murder” that her friend in Tulsa, OK told her about. 

Owen McKay was a loving and devoted husband who suddenly snapped and went crazy, killing his wife and year-old son. When he is arrested, he is put in a holding cell and before the jail psychiatrist can evaluate him, he is found dead, shot through the heart. No one is on video as having visited him in the cell. 

Winter’s curiosity is piqued, and he decides to fly out to Tulsa and investigate. Everyone he talks to who were involved in the case have been terrorized into silence, and he can’t get anywhere with them. Finally, the doctor who performed the autopsy agrees to meet Cameron, and he tells him that he found some kind of device with wires embedded in McKay’s brain. However, the final report has scrubbed all of his notes about it. 

When Winter returns, a very creepy tattooed man is waiting for him in his apartment and nearly kills him. He is obviously getting close to something big. Then, he reads about another murder that happened in Connecticut that has eerie similarities to murders McKay committed. When he goes up there to investigate, it’s clear the murders are connected. 

And so, Cameron Winter finds himself neck-deep in a conspiracy involving the highest levels of the federal government, an unscrupulous tech company, and an amoral venture capitalist. He’s also under constant threat from the mysterious Tat Man.

To leaven the darkness, Klavan develops the relationship between Gwendolyn and Cameron. She is a devout Christian, and he is, at best, an agnostic. And yet, he has respect for her faith, and a small gift she gives him ends up saving his life. They fall in love with each other while feeling as if they were destined to do so from the beginning of time. 

I also enjoyed Klavan’s lampooning of faculty politics. Lori Lesser is the woke administrator who has it in for Winter, because he insists on teaching only classic poetry and not including subpar literature produced by minority authors. Besides, how many people of color have written English Romantic poetry? There is a very funny scene where Cameron and Lori are meeting with the dean in his office, and Cameron has trouble focusing on Lori’s jargon-laden arguments:

What was she saying? Winter sometimes wondered as the meeting dragged on. But too late: He had lost track of it and was too distracted to catch up. It had something to do with racialism and historic injustices and the systemic metaphorical violence of favoring the poetry of John Keats over whatever blithering doggerel had been scrawled by lesser and justly forgotten versifiers of some oppressed minority or other. So he assumed, anyway, because Lori was always talking about such things, and because some of her catchphrases seemed to leap out at him as if made momentarily visible in the office air.

Klavan, Andrew. After That, the Dark (Cameron Winter Mysteries Book 5) (p. 238). Penzler Publishers. Kindle Edition.

After That, The Dark is a turning point in Winter’s development. His long-time therapist (who has a bit of a crush on him, despite being much older) realizes that his crisis is behind him, and he is becoming comfortable in his own skin. Comfortable enough to risk being vulnerable with Gwendolyn. His relationship with the Recruiter has also matured, to the point where Winter no longer carries out his directives unquestioningly. It will be fascinating to see how an fully integrated and confident Cameron Winter handles his next case!

Andrew Klavan’s A Woman Underground

Book number 51 of 2024

Andrew Klavan is one of my favorite writers and thinkers. He has written many mysteries, thrillers, and some very good nonfiction, as well as producing a weekly podcast on politics and culture. A Woman Underground is the fourth book in his Cameron Winter series, which just gets better and better with each installment.

Winter is a wonderfully deep and complex character – a professor of Romantic literature at a small midwestern college, he was an especially deadly counterintelligence assassin for some very dark and secret missions earlier in his life. Every novel in the series has flashbacks to Winter’s career as a deadly assassin, as he relates them to his therapist – a kindly, older woman who is very much attracted to him. Winter is incapable of maintaining any kind of relationship, because his parents, wealthy New Yorkers, had neither the time nor the inclination to care for him.

His nanny was a refugee from East Germany, and he never got over his childhood crush of her niece, Charlotte Shaefer. His unrequited love has served as an excuse to avoid any intimacy in his adult life. He is a deeply troubled man with a code of honor he tries to live by, even though he is not at all religious. Think of a Raymond Chandler character dropped into the 21st century.

A Woman Underground begins with Part 1: The Scent of Something Gone, Winter realizes that Charlotte may be trying to get in touch with him. One evening he comes home to his apartment and smells the lingering scent of her perfume in the hall. The next morning, he studies the building’s security video, and he sees a bundled up woman carrying a book. The book turns out to be a novel that is popular with right-wing extremists, and it features a heroine who is too similar to Charlotte to be a coincidence. Winter quickly tracks down the author. To avoid any spoilers, I won’t reveal any more details!

Klavan does a masterful job of balancing four(!) separate stories while keeping the reader glued to the page. First, there is the main plotline of Winter tracking down Charlotte. Then, there is a plotline involving an old mission Winter was assigned to bring back an agent who had disappeared in Turkey. When Winter is in therapy, he keeps returning to this story, even though his therapist knows he’s doing it to avoid facing what’s really causing his psychological distress. Third, there’s the plotline of the novel Charlotte was carrying when she tried to see Winter. In it, a small group of right-wingers try to decide what to do during the riots that caused so unrest and destruction in the summer of 2020. Cameron is reading this novel to try to pick up clues as to where Charlotte might be. The fourth subplot is some sexual shenanigans Winter’s colleague at the college gets himself into. Believe it or not, all four of these stories slowly come together into one.

A Woman Underground is a pivotal chapter in Cameron Winter’s development. Several things that had stunted his emotional and psychological maturity are dealt with and resolved. The path to that resolution, however, is a harrowing one. As Klavan describes him, he spends most of the book on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It is only through his therapist’s insightful and compassionate work that he is able to come out whole. By the end, it’s clear that Winter has emerged battered, but stronger and more resilient. I can’t wait to see what Andrew Klavan has in store for him. Bubbling under the surface of the various subplots is a potential global conspiracy that involves extremely powerful Americans who have been compromised. It’s enough to turn the most level-headed person into a paranoid lunatic, and the people Winter can completely trust are down to very few. Things are getting very interesting in Cameron Winter’s life!