“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.

He was thinking about this when the waiter brought the check to him. Gwendolyn made a motion toward her purse.

“Now, now,” he said, “don’t try any of that twenty-first-century stuff with me.”

“You’re right, she said. “It’s a rotten century. I only stay for the antibiotics.”

It has become a tradition for me to purchase and savor each new Cameron Winter book by Andrew Klavan as soon as it comes out, and to tell the world what a pleasure that annual event has become in my life. After That, the Dark is the fifth in the series, and I enjoyed it, though (I must admit) a little less than I expected. That is for reasons which author Klavan has no doubt anticipated and discounted in his own mind. I’ll get to that.

Cameron Winter, our continuing hero, is a former assassin for a super-secret government division which no longer exists. After its dissolution, he reinvented himself as an English professor, He now teaches at a small college somewhere in the Midwest.

A thread that ties the books together is his conversations with his psychologist Margaret, who is helping him work through his old traumas and sins. Recently she has been particularly interested in his relationship (or reluctance to initiate a relationship) with Gwendolyn Lord, a widow he met a couple books ago, with whom he struck immediate sparks.

In After That, the Dark, Cameron finally asks her out, only to be blindsided by how well it goes. The two are not simply compatible – they click together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. And in this story, the investigation is sparked, not as usual by Cameron’s sixth sense for hidden mysteries in crimes in the news, but by a puzzle posed by Gwendolyn herself. She tells him about a friend who works in a prison, where a “locked room” murder occurred. A prisoner, who had been strip-searched, is found shot to death with a nail gun in a padded, locked cell.

Cameron goes to the prison town to look into the matter. He is not aware that he’s at the center of a conspiracy, among the moves and countermoves of highly placed, faceless, ruthless chess players. Cameron is a gifted operative, and he’ll need all his gifts to survive this one.

Was After That, the Dark fun to read? Sure was. Was it as good as its predecessors? Maybe not quite – I’m not sure.

My main problem was moral. Gwendolyn, Cameron’s new love interest, is an open and devoted Christian. Yet (minor spoiler alert) she falls straight into bed with him at the first opportunity. I could have understood that plot point if it were treated as a mistake, but in the aftermath she justifies it, saying that they were clearly made for each other by God, so it must be okay.

Andrew Klavan is a wise and perceptive writer. Surely he’s aware that everybody who’s ever fallen in love feels exactly the same way.

It should be noted that Klavan is a convert to Christianity, and comes to the topic from a different angle than “cradle Christians” like me. Also that these books are not intended as “Christian fiction” in the same way that the average CBA book is.

Nevertheless, that rationalization for premarital sex is, in my opinion, too predictable and conventional for a writer of Andrew Klavan’s considerable wisdom.

Otherwise, highly recommended.