I will stipulate to being a hopeless fanboy in regard to Andrew Klavan’s novels. But I insist that I came by my enthusiasm honestly. I didn’t discover Klavan after I’d learned he was a conservative and a Christian. I was a fan before he was either—decades ago, when he was still writing superior mysteries about the self-destructive newspaper reporter John Wells, under the pseudonym Keith Peterson. I recognized this Peterson fellow as an author who delivered gripping stories, made more compelling by his rare talent for crafting interesting, layered characters. It was a delight to discover that he had not disappeared, but was persevering under his true identity, going from strength to strength as a writer. His politics and Christian conversion made it perfect.

Klavan’s latest novel, The Identity Man, is less overtly Christian than his previous adult thriller, Empire of Lies. That doesn’t mean he’s hiding his light under a bushel. The Christianity is there, but implicit in the main plot, explicit in sub-plots. The theme of the story, as the title implies, is human identity. Who are we as individuals? Are we capable of choosing how we will live, or are we determined by heredity and environment and social pressure? Do we find our personal identities in our individual choices and character, or in our ethnicity?

The protagonist (I won’t say hero, because he isn’t one at the start) is John Shannon (not, we are informed, his real name, which we’re never actually told), a small-time criminal. Although he has superior skills as a carpenter and wood carver, he finds himself unable to resist periodic impulses to taste the thrill of breaking and entering.

One night, while doing a burglary with a sleazy partner, he performs a good deed, almost to his own surprise. His partner tries to rape a girl, and John breaks his leg for him. Then he runs to escape the police. His partner gets his revenge by fingering him for a multiple murder, and Shannon finds himself the object of a city-wide manhunt.

He’s trying to figure out a way to escape to Mexico when he gets a cryptic message from a mysterious, anonymous benefactor, who offers to give him a new face and identity, and to set him up in a new city. It sounds too good to be true, but his options are limited, so he takes the offer. Soon he meets “the identity man,” a foreign doctor who never tells him his name. The identity man scoffs at the idea of making new beginnings, even as he performs plastic surgery on Shannon, and oversees his recovery. “Identity like stain,” he says in accented English. People don’t change.

Shannon’s new city is unnamed in the book. It incorporates elements of New Orleans after Katrina, Detroit, and (I think) Chicago. Much of the city lies in ruins, its poorest citizens subsisting like rats in holes. The city’s government is as rotten as its infrastructure.

Among the rottenest is the story’s antagonist, Police Lieutenant “Brick” Ramsey. Lt. Ramsey is a pure hypocrite, a man who projects an image of incorruptibility, but has sold his soul to the extent that he even commits murder on the orders of his bosses. In his secret heart he agonizes over how he’s fallen from his earlier ideals, but the work of repentance would cost too much. Maybe next year he’ll try to be a better man.

Shannon takes a repair job for a college professor named Applebee, and meets the man’s widowed daughter, Teresa, and her son. He is strongly attracted to the whole family, and gradually finds himself drawn into their circle of love, conceiving feelings for Teresa Applebee he’s never felt before for anyone.

But Lt. Ramsey discovers evidence that suggests that Shannon knows something about a hit job he’s done. Failing to get Shannon killed, he turns against the Applebees, intending to use them as leverage to draw Shannon out. Then, of course, they will all have to die. Nothing personal.

What Shannon must do then, to protect the people he’s come to love, cuts to the very heart of his identity, forcing him to do things he never dreamed himself capable of.

A striking aspect of The Identity Man is the courageous way it deals with the dangerous subject of identity politics. Klavan is unsparing in his dissection of the destructive consequences of organizing—and exploiting—people on the basis of race. It’s interesting to note how Shannon, who is never presented as a saint, walks into the Applebee home and draws conclusions about its owners as people, on the basis of the furnishings. Lt. Ramsey, when he later walks into the same house, draws conclusions about the Applebees as black people.

The climactic showdown of the story is harrowing and deeply moving.

My only criticism is I wish the book had been longer (though how could a book so sparely and effectively written be improved by lengthening it?).

Cautions for language and adult subject matter. My highest recommendation for The Identity Man.