{"id":18875,"date":"2023-11-02T20:16:16","date_gmt":"2023-11-03T00:16:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=18875"},"modified":"2023-11-02T20:16:16","modified_gmt":"2023-11-03T00:16:16","slug":"the-house-of-love-and-death-by-andrew-klavan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=18875","title":{"rendered":"‘The House of Love and Death,’ by Andrew Klavan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A young woman, slender as cigarette smoke, drifted toward him across the lawn. A breeze blew, bearing the first biting chill of winter. An armada of cumulous clouds sailed across the blue sky. Winter could picture the smoke-thin girl borne away on the breeze and vanishing. Yet on she came.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve reached a strange point<\/strong> in my strange life when I no longer get Christmas presents. And yet I do get Christmas a present each year, ever since Andrew Klavan started writing his Cameron Winter books. These are my Christmas presents (a little early), even if I do have to buy them myself, and I await them with under-the-tree anticipation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Klavan does the thing he does, perhaps, better than anyone alive. And it all comes together seamlessly in this idiosyncratic series of novels about a former government black-ops assassin, retired to teach English at a small midwestern college, but occasionally intruding himself into a murder investigation. Because he has a \u201cstrange habit of mind,\u201d an instinctive ability to project himself into crimes, analyzing motives and methods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In The House of Love and Death<\/a><\/em>, the third in the series, Cam reads a news story about a multiple murder in Maidenvale, a small town not far from Chicago. In a mansion in a gated community, three members of a wealthy family were gunned down, along with their nanny. The police suspect the slain daughter\u2019s boyfriend, a Mexican-American boy who attended her private school. But Cam senses a hidden logic in the crime, a logic he can\u2019t yet put his finger on. So he drives to Maidenvale to ask questions. He finds the local police detective hostile, and adamant the boyfriend is innocent. A female security guard at the gated community is certain the boy did it. But Cam isn\u2019t convinced either way. Before he gets to the truth, he\u2019ll face threats from the police, the local drug gangs, and the family of one of the victims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a way, though, this is all a kind of distraction. Cam has reached a crisis point in his sessions with his psychologist, Margaret. He\u2019s preparing to open up to her at a new level \u2013 to reveal to her the worst thing he ever did in his life as an assassin. Something that\u2019s closed his heart off and prevented his forming romantic connections in all the years since. But will the truth be too much for even her to accept?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another interesting plot thread is an ongoing subplot about Lori, a \u201cdiversity\u201d officer at the college, who\u2019s made it her mission to get Cam fired, not realizing that her inquiries are raising red flags in Washington. If she only knew it, Cam is the only thing standing between her and deniable liquidation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wish I could have brought myself to read The House of Love and Death<\/em> more slowly. I\u2019ll probably read it again.  I can\u2019t imagine how it could have been better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A young woman, slender as cigarette smoke, drifted toward him across the lawn. A breeze blew, bearing the first biting chill of winter. An armada of cumulous clouds sailed across the blue sky. Winter could picture the smoke-thin girl borne away on the breeze and vanishing. Yet on she came. I\u2019ve reached a strange point … Continue reading ‘The House of Love and Death,’ by Andrew Klavan<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[183,3939,4938],"class_list":["post-18875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reviews","tag-andrew-klavan","tag-cameron-winter","tag-the-house-of-love-and-death"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18875"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18877,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18875\/revisions\/18877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}