“I don’t think there is a middle ground. I have a job here. I teach poetry to young people. Poetry is a thing. It’s a thing that does a thing, or tries to do it. It tries to use words to unite the material world with its greater meanings….”

Because I love Andrew Klavan’s Cameron Winter novels so, I make it my custom to read each one twice (when they’re new; no doubt there will be further readings down the road). So this is my second review of the fifth book in the series, After That the Dark.

Our hero, secret government assassin turned English professor Cameron Winter, finally has his first date with Gwendolyn Lord, the woman he’s been dancing around over the course of the two previous books. And it’s good. It’s more than good. They click. They complement each other. They seem to have very little in common in terms of tastes, but they fill each other’s empty spaces. It all rather scares him.

Just to make conversation, she tells him a story she figures is right up his alley. A friend of hers, who works at a penitentiary in Oklahoma, has witnessed a “locked door mystery.” A prisoner, a man who went crazy and murdered his wife and little son, had been locked into a padded cell, wearing only his underwear. A few hours later he was found dead, killed with a nail gun. Officially, it’s listed as a suicide, but where did he get the nail gun?

Just to please Gwendolyn, Winter goes to Oklahoma to ask questions. He does not expect that his questions will lead him to a confrontation with one of the most powerful men in the world, and with a nightmarish assassin he’s already tangled with once before.

On this second reading, I think I understand better what After That the Dark is all about. The heart of the thing is the body-soul nexus, the way flesh and spirit coexist. The dark conspiracy Winter uncovers and fights involves an attempt to overcome the problem of crime through purely mechanistic means. The scene where (spoiler alert) Winter goes to bed with Gwendolyn is a counterpoint, illustrating the truth that flesh and spirit are reconciled through love, not through man’s reason or technology.

I suppose that’s Klavan’s reason for putting the two of them in bed together – in spite of the fact that Gwendolyn is supposed to be a faithful, born-again Christian. It still bothers me, not because I demand stories where Christians are perfect, but because it seems to ignore Christian sexual morality altogether. Still, even fornication is “becoming one flesh” according to Scripture, so it works thematically.

An amusing continuing element in each of these books is the character of “Stan-stan Stankowski,” the ultimate undercover operative. Stan-stan always shows up at some point to pass on information, either from the government or from Winters’ old superior. The thing about Stan-stan is that he seems to have no personal identity, or even a body of his own. In the previous book he was passing as a large, burly wilderness guide. In this book, he appears as a tiny, delicate Asian woman. He’s literally impossible – if the books are ever filmed, they’ll have to use a different actor each time out. But it’s a funny plot device, and suggestive of the flesh/spirit conundrum that is this book’s theme.

All in all, I really enjoyed After That the Dark, like all the books in the series. I haven’t reconciled myself to the sex scene, but it’s not enough to turn me against this fascinating series.