Winter, who a moment before had been truly worried he was losing his mind, was now wondering if he was the last sane man on earth. So often he struggled with the fact that he had killed people. But just now he was wondering if maybe he hadn’t killed enough of them. Maybe he should have killed them all.

It has become my custom to read each of Andrew Klavan’s Cameron Winter novels twice, as I find them peculiarly suited to my emotional world (which is not to claim that I am anything like Winter, who is, for instance, both dangerous and attractive to women). On my first reading of A Woman Underground last fall, I didn’t find it as congenial as some of the others. I liked it better on second reading. I think I missed things the first time out, for purely subjective reasons.

Cameron Winter is not your average English professor. Not long ago he was a top-secret government assassin. His stories interweave his memories of his past as he confides in his psychological therapist, who is helping him work through his guilt and conflicts.

In A Woman Underground, Winter reminisces about a terrible assignment he carried out once, dealing with a human trafficker in Turkey. But his therapist, an older woman, keeps trying to turn the discussion to his old obsession with a girl he fell in love with as a child, who eventually turned into a very different person from the one he first knew. Winter tries to explain that both stories are connected. But then he discovers that this lost love made a secret visit to his apartment, though she missed him. That’s enough to put him on her trail – and soon he will realize that he’s not the only man out looking for her.

I think what made me uncomfortable in my first reading of A Woman Underground was that it hit me in areas that are sore spots in my own interior world – romantic obsession and betrayal. On my second reading I recognized better how well the story serves Winter’s character development and the overall series narrative arc. I was also happier with the darkly ironic denouement this time.

Either way, the book was utterly gripping, and I neglected things I should have been doing to read another chapter.

A Woman Underground is a superior mystery-thriller, worthy of the groundbreaking series to which it belongs.