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.

Since in Winters’s interior world, it was always the year 1795, he did not like to curse in front of a lady, so he swallowed his first reaction and said, “That’s awful.”

I wish Andrew Klavan’s Cameron Winter novels were two or three times longer than they are. It’s a gift of God that a writer of Klavan’s caliber has become a Christian, thus permitting the creation of amazing books like these (though the Christian subtext is always kept sub). I suppose not everyone reacts to them as I do. Some people don’t like them, after all. And perhaps I respond viscerally to the main character himself, because I identify with him.

In any case, A Woman Underground begins with one of our English professor hero’s stories from his past, as told to Margaret, his psychologist. It’s a disturbing story about a colleague of his from his days as a government assassin, the straightest arrow of all straightest arrows and a devout Christian, who disappeared on assignment in Turkey and Cameron was sent to find out what happened to him….

But Margaret interrupts him. She wants to know whether he’s phoned the woman he met in the last book, the one with whom he had a mutual attraction. No, he hasn’t. Why not? Well, he’s been dealing with some things…

Yes indeed, he has. He’s still obsessing about Charlotte, the girl he fell in love with as a child. She learned some shocking things about her family years ago, and just went off the rails, running off with a fringe political group.

You need to find Charlotte, to get some closure, Margaret tells him. And almost immediately, Charlotte appears – sort of. Cameron goes home to his apartment and smells her childhood perfume in the air. An examination of his building’s security recordings shows that a woman did come to his door. It looks like it might have been her. She’s carrying a book. That book will be the clue that leads Cameron on a trail into the shadowy world of the right-wing underground, to lies and betrayals and shattered illusions.

The previous Cameron Winter books have run on a formula – Cameron’s “strange habit of mind” kicks in – his brain enters a sort of fugue state, where he intuits a crime that the police can’t see. And so he goes in to meddle and see that justice is done. This time, the big mystery is his own, and though the “strange habit” makes its appearance, this time it’s to help him solve mysteries rather than to discover their existence. This way works just as well.

I know I’ll read it again. I read them all again. A Woman Underground is a stellar addition to one of the best mystery series going.