Andrew Klavan’s After That, The Dark - A New Cameron Winter Mystery

After That, The Dark is the fifth novel in Andrew Klavan's Cameron Winter series, and it is the best one so far. Cameron Winter is a very interesting character who has shown more and more depth to his personality as the series has progressed. He is a former "black ops" agent who is still intensely loyal to his former commander, the Recruiter. However, the Recruiter has had to go underground due to political pressure fomented by the ultra-wealthy tech mogul, Thaddeus Blatt. For the first time, there are cracks in Winter's unquestioning trust in the one person who gave his life meaning.

Winter is currently employed as a professor of English Romantic poetry at a small college outside of Washington, D.C., but he manages to get embroiled in various murders that seem open-and-shut cases until he starts asking uncomfortable questions. In After That, The Dark, the murder in question is brought up by Gwendolyn Lord, a therapist he met in the third book, The House of Love and Death. He was immediately attracted to her, but it took him quite a while to screw up the courage to ask her out. While they are on their first date, she mentions an "impossible murder" that her friend in Tulsa, OK told her about.

Owen McKay was a loving and devoted husband who suddenly snapped and went crazy, killing his wife and year-old son. When he is arrested, he is put in a holding cell and before the jail psychiatrist can evaluate him, he is found dead, shot through the heart. No one is on video as having visited him in the cell.

Winter's curiosity is piqued, and he decides to fly out to Tulsa and investigate. Everyone he talks to who was involved in the case has been terrorized into silence, and he can't get anywhere with them. Finally, the doctor who performed the autopsy agrees to meet Cameron, and he tells him that he found some kind of device with wires embedded in McKay's brain. However, the final report has scrubbed all of his notes about it.

When Winter returns, a very creepy tattooed man is waiting for him in his apartment and nearly kills him. He is obviously getting close to something big. Then, he reads about another murder that happened in Connecticut that has eerie similarities to the murders McKay committed. When he goes up there to investigate, it's clear the murders are connected.

And so, Cameron Winter finds himself neck-deep in a conspiracy involving the highest levels of the federal government, an unscrupulous tech company, and an amoral venture capitalist. He's also under constant threat from the mysterious Tat Man.

To leaven the darkness, Klavan develops the relationship between Gwendolyn and Cameron. She is a devout Christian, and he is, at best, an agnostic. And yet, he has respect for her faith, and a small gift she gives him ends up saving his life. They fall in love with each other while feeling as if they were destined to do so from the beginning of time.

I also enjoyed Klavan's lampooning of faculty politics. Lori Lesser is the woke administrator who has it in for Winter, because he insists on teaching only classic poetry and not including subpar literature produced by minority authors. Besides, how many people of color have written English Romantic poetry? There is a very funny scene where Cameron and Lori are meeting with the dean in his office, and Cameron has trouble focusing on Lori's jargon-laden arguments:

What was she saying? Winter sometimes wondered as the meeting dragged on. But too late: He had lost track of it and was too distracted to catch up. It had something to do with racialism and historic injustices and the systemic metaphorical violence of favoring the poetry of John Keats over whatever blithering doggerel had been scrawled by lesser and justly forgotten versifiers of some oppressed minority or other. So he assumed, anyway, because Lori was always talking about such things, and because some of her catchphrases seemed to leap out at him as if made momentarily visible in the office air.

Klavan, Andrew. After That, the Dark (Cameron Winter Mysteries Book 5) (p. 238). Penzler Publishers. Kindle Edition.

After That, The Dark is a turning point in Winter's development. His long-time therapist (who has a bit of a crush on him, despite being much older) realizes that his crisis is behind him, and he is becoming comfortable in his own skin. Comfortable enough to risk being vulnerable with Gwendolyn. His relationship with the Recruiter has also matured to the point where Winter no longer carries out his directives unquestioningly. It will be fascinating to see how a fully integrated and confident Cameron Winter handles his next case!

Andrew Klavan has been on a crusade urging talented conservatives to produce good art — in film, music, and literature. He is someone who practices what he preaches — his Cameron Winter series is a model of great storytelling that comes from a conservative perspective. He doesn't bang the reader over the head with it; it's just a natural aspect of the overall story. Winter is not a conservative superman; he's a deeply flawed man who is slowly recognizing some important truths.

If we are at the beginning of a renaissance of meaningful and lasting art that springs from conservative principles, it will be due, in large part, to creative people like Andrew Klavan.