The House of Love and Death

by Andrew Klavan

Overview

Instant USA Today Bestseller

In the newest entry in the bestselling Cameron Winter series, the ex-spy-turned-English professor defies accepted narratives and corrupt local authorities to investigate the murder of a wealthy family in the Chicago suburbs.

Cameron Winter is known for having a sense about crime. His background as a spy trained his mind—and his body—for action, and his current role as an English professor gives him a sharp understanding of human nature. But beyond that, he was born with a "strange habit of mind"—the ability to recreate detailed crime scenes in his imagination and dissect the motives and encounters that produced them. And after reading a puzzling news story about a wealthy family killed in a small town in the Chicago suburbs, he can't resist the chance to apply this deductive power in the pursuit of justice for the victims.

Three members of the family, along with their live-in nanny, were pulled from their burning mansion, already dead from gunshot wounds. The only survivor is a young boy whose memory of the event raises more questions than answers. The police seem happy to settle on a simple explanation and arrest the most obvious suspect—but Winter knows that obvious solutions are seldom the correct ones, and all too often hide a darker truth.

While Winter’s investigation is welcomed by many who knew the victims, the lead detective makes it clear he not only wants Winters to stop looking for answers, but to stay out of his town altogether. Winter begins to understand why as he slowly uncovers crimes and unsavory behavior that had been ignored long before the killings, and in the process grows increasingly determined to find the real killer and expose the rot beneath the town’s sanitized façade. And as the inquiry brings all-too-familiar sins to the surface, he’ll have to confront his own inner demons once and for all.

Insightful and atmospheric, The House of Love and Death is a penetrating mystery with a plot that cuts straight to the dark heart of some of modern America’s most pressing issues.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613164464
Publisher:	Penzler Publishers
Publication date:	10/31/2023
Series:	Cameron Winter Mysteries
Pages:	312
Sales rank:	101,319
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Andrew Klavan is the author of such internationally bestselling crime novels as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood, Don’t Say A Word, filmed starring Michael Douglas, Empire of Lies and Werewolf Cop.  He has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award five times and has won twice. He wrote the screenplays to “A Shock to The System,” which starred Michael Caine, “One Missed Call,” which starred Edward Burns, and “Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer,” starring Dean Cain. His political satire videos have been viewed by tens of millions of people, and he currently does a popular podcast The Andrew Klavan Show at the Daily Wire. He is also the author of a memoir about his religious journey The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ. His fantasy-suspense trilogy Another Kingdom was among the top 100 podcasts.

Read an Excerpt

The burning mansion rose above him like a great beast of flame. The flames roared red from its high windows. They pranced and jabbered behind the picture pane on the ground floor. Above the lovely wooded lane, patches of the pale blue dawn caught the glow and turned a feverish pink. Swaths of the meridian, meanwhile, were smothered under the black smoke that flooded up out of the raging heart of the conflagration.

Later, Guerrero would say he sensed Death standing inside that burning house, sensed Death standing like a hooded phantom, very still amidst the dancing fire.

Lenny Guerrero was Search and Rescue, Truck 48, the first truck. A broad, strong, boyishly handsome man in his mid-30’s, he was at the truck’s side near the curb, near the lawn. The light arrays from the truck and the nearby engine, Engine 39, flashed scarlet and shadow over him as he worked to get himself game ready. Strapping his air pack on, his mask on, his hood on, his helmet.

Around him, there was movement, action, everywhere. The pipeman was ‘making’ the hydrant by the curb while the heelman kept the line clean behind him as the water brought the hose to life. The two-man entry team was already at the mansion door, one man hacking at the jamb with an axe, the other working a Halligan, trying to pry the whole structure free.

Guerrero had often noticed — a lot of the guys noticed — how such moments — these moments just before you went in — could become bizarrely quiet, bizarrely slow — slow and graceful and almost silent, beautiful even, like some kind of strange ballet without the music. Supposedly it was because your brain was working so fast, the images and noises of the world couldn’t keep up with it. That’s what the Captain said anyway.

Anyway, it was in that moment — that slow, quiet, graceful moment, with the pipeman setting off the first blast of water as the door came free, as the flames exploded outward into the dawn light, as a second engine pulled up with its array leisurely turning and its siren sounding weirdly far away — it was in that moment that he felt Death, Death like a phantom, standing in the house, waiting in there, waiting for him, Guerrero, to come and discover the work of his skeleton hands.

Then he was racing up the rolling lawn, under the autumn trees beneath the smoke-choked sunrise. He followed the hose through the gaping door and suddenly everything was fast. The black smoke swallowed him fast. The heat washed over him fast, heat but no light. He dropped to his knees for safety.

He started crawling in the dark. Searching, blind, deaf except for the click of the regulator, the thump of his own heart. His heart — that was fast, too. And the flames were fast to the right and left of him.

Guerrero worked to calm himself. At best, he had 45-minutes of air in his pack, but breathing this hard, he’d be ‘on bells’ in fifteen minutes tops. A Catholic, he drew himself down into the quiet of his faith, and handed his life to God. Experience had taught him he could do this, and it worked. His breathing slowed. The world slowed and grew quiet again.

Good, he thought. Good. It would make the air pack last longer.

He began to make his way, crawling through the roiling darkness, searching for the fallen.

You found them just inside the doors usually. They tried to get out and couldn’t work the knob or couldn’t locate it. Then the smoke overcame them and they went down right there, sometimes blocking the door so you had to shove it open to get to them. Kids, a lot of times, you found hiding under a bed, or in a bathroom in the bathtub, any place that felt safe to them in the panic of the moment.

But Guerrero found the first woman at the foot of the stairs. Crawling on his hands and knees, blind in the black smoke, he felt the yielding softness of her hand beneath his heavy glove. His heart seemed to stop and darken because he knew at once there was no chance for her. Swiftly, expertly, he worked her limp body over his shoulder. It was still too hot in the house, too black for him to stand straight. He found his feet, but kept low, very low, and charged back toward the doorway with the woman slung over his back.

It wasn’t until he laid her on the grass that he saw she had been murdered. Even when he did see it, he could barely comprehend what he saw. He brought her body forward and released it, cradling her head in his hand to soften her landing.

She floated gracefully down to the grass, her arms slanting out to either side of her. She seemed to him oddly untouched by the smoke and flames.

She was a woman in her forties or early fifties, blonde and slim and attractive. She was wearing an elegant powder blue nightgown. There was a bullet hole in her, right in the center of her torso. It flashed through Guerrero’s mind that she’d been killed with a deer rifle, something like a thirty-ought-six slug. The hole in her was almost the size of a fist. For another second, he still considered starting CPR, but there was no point. She was way, way dead.

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/28/2023

Klavan’s blistering third whodunit featuring hit man-turned-poetry professor Cameron Winter (after 2022’s A Strange Habit of Mind) is the best yet. In a gated community in the Chicago suburbs, firefighters respond to a blaze at the home of psychologist Norman Wasserman to find Norman; his wife, Marion; their teenage daughter, Lila; and their live-in nanny, Agnes, shot to death. Only seven-year-old Robert survives, as Agnes ushered him out of an upper-story window before she died. When questioned by the police, Robert reports hearing the voice of Lila’s boyfriend, Mateo Hernandez, inside the house just before the tragedy; that testimony, coupled with the disappearance of two of Mateo’s father’s guns, makes the teenager the primary suspect. Winter, who’s recently begun psychotherapy to cope with his violent past, is drawn to the mystery for reasons he doesn’t completely understand—what he does know, however, is that he’s not convinced by the case against Mateo. He begins investigating the deaths himself (much to the dismay of the lead detective on the case) and discovers rot at the heart of the Wassermans’ seemingly idyllic community. Klavan successfully deepens Winter’s character as the professor digs into his own past, Tony Soprano style, and the central murder mystery remains gripping throughout. Fans of complex investigators like Thomas Harris’s Will Graham will be enthralled. Agent: Mark Gottlieb, Trident Media Group. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Cameron Winter is a terrific protagonist, such a complex and determined character. It is easy to follow along with him straight to the conclusion of this fiery and unpredictable thriller."

BookReporter

"Andrew Klavan is the most original American novelist of crime and suspense since Cornell Woolrich."

Stephen King

"Klavan’s writing ability and his intelligence show up on every page and make the ride worthwhile."

NY Journal of Books

"Andrew Klavan is a superb entertainer, and his work has real substance. I look forward to his books like I looked forward to Christmas when I was a kid."

Dean Koontz

2023-08-25
A former proxy assassin seems determined to work off his guilt by immersing himself in unrelated mysteries.

The job Cameron Winter did for a shadowy federal agency wasn’t to kill people but to arrange for them to be killed by someone else. After a confrontation with someone he had to shoot directly, he goes into retirement as a teacher of Romantic poetry at a university in the Chicago suburbs, where he catches a news story about the Wasserman family—psychologist Norman, community volunteer Marion, their teenage daughter, Lila, and Agnes Wilde, the live-in nanny for their 7-year-old son, Robert—all but the boy shot to death in their home in upscale Maidenvale, which was then set afire. There’s much to baffle Inspector Roland Strange and his colleagues, but the mystery that Winter finds irresistible is why the nanny, who lowered her charge from a second-story window and urged him to run away, didn’t follow him herself. Interspersed with the story of Winter’s investigation is a series of counseling sessions with therapist Margaret Whitaker in which he recounts his involvement in his last and most disturbing case, which climaxes with his memorable confession: “For the sake of the mission, I drew her into my arms.” Klavan, who’s more interested in multiplying suspenseful plotlines than in tying them neatly together, provides an incidental high point: his hero’s monologues during what must be the most revealing therapy sessions ever.

A compelling demonstration of why a self-tormenting killer makes the perfect detective.

Kirkus Reviews