He was the bigger one, really big, and heavy, a building of a man with a face like a sledgehammer.

I think I’ve made up my mind about where Cameron Winter, hero of Andrew Klavan’s outstanding ongoing series of mystery/thrillers, lives and works. Occasionally, reference is made in these books to the Minnesota border. It’s pretty clear that he lives in a state that borders mine. That means it’s one of four states – the two Dakotas, Iowa, or Wisconsin. One can write off the Dakotas, I think, because the Dakotas aren’t progressive enough. Iowa is a little more progressive, but not as progressive as Winter’s state seems to be, and it’s not sufficiently interesting topographically.

No, I’m pretty sure now that Winter teaches at a small university in Wisconsin. We’re also told it’s the capitol of the state, so it must be in Madison. But it can’t be the University of Wisconsin-Madison, because Winter’s school is small.

So it’s a small, independent university located in Madison. Doubtless a fictional one.

That settled, let’s go on to discuss the latest Cameron Winter book, Find Me Nowhere, which I preordered, and devoured almost the moment it was released.

We begin with a scene from a secret military operation in Afghanistan. The point of view character is thinking about an astonishingly beautiful woman he saw recently, when he witnesses his best buddy being blown to bits in a cave.

Then we switch to Cameron Winter’s world. He is now, for the first time in his life, a happy man. He’s blissfully in love with his girlfriend, Gwendolyn Lord, a born-again Christian (who, oddly, justifies going to bed with him out of wedlock). His therapy with his psychologist is going so well that they’re both considering ending the counseling.

Then he’s approached by the Recruiter, his old mentor from his days as a deniable/expendable government assassin. The Recruiter asks him, just as a favor, to investigate the fatal stabbing of a man in a dying Pennsylvania town. Since it’s the Recruiter asking, Winter knows there’s a deeper agenda here, but it never crosses his mind to say no.

The Pennsylvania town is a victim of globalization. Once it was a factory town, but all the jobs were offshored. Now the main sources of income are welfare, collected by the multitudes of immigrants the government has imported, and drug dealing. The dead man was the father of the soldier we saw killed at the beginning of the book. Winter starts asking questions, which leads to his being attacked by thugs, repeatedly. But he learns that the murder victim had been saying that his son was still alive, that he had seen and talked to him.

The quality that struck me most, as I read Find Me Nowhere, was its density. I don’t mean that in a negative way at all. I’m talking density in the sense of texture and weight. Every line in this book has heft. There is no fluff. Several things were always going on at once, and there were layers of meaning and revelation at every point.

Find Me Nowhere is a transcendent book, full of love and joy and tragedy and despair. I’ll be reading it again soon, because I always do that with this series. A lot of books lag in places – even if I love the writer and enjoy the book, there are moments when reading feels like a bit of work. Reading this book was like bingeing chocolate, a decadent pleasure I’ve recently had to give up for my health.

My highest recommendation on this one.