I ordered this and it arrived a long time ago, but I just now got to it. (Look at me! I am powering through my TBR like a good girl!) Once I opened it, I finished in just a few days because it’s that good.

This is the third book in the Cameron Winter series. Winter is a character created by Andrew Klavan, reportedly the first character Klavan has created that he’s felt could sustain a whole series. Winter is a former spy who is now a professor of Romantic English Literature at an unnamed university in an unnamed Great Lake state (but pretty obviously Madison, Wisconsin). So he fits into that beloved mystery trope, a character who looks unprepossessing (in this case, because he’s a slight, blond, pretty-boy academic) and whom people consequently underestimate, unaware of his hand-to-hand combat skills.

It was fortuitous that I read House not too long after reading The Bourne Treachery, which is also a spy story featuring a longstanding character. Winter even has, in this book, some experiences similar to those Bourne has in Treachery. However, the two books couldn’t be more different.

Winter does check many of the same boxes as Bourne, and House checks many of the same action-novel boxes as Treachery. It moves a little slower and is a little less intricate, but not much. But it is way more emotional. This is one of those mysteries where, after you find out whodunit, you have to set the book down and (if you are a soft touch) cry for a while as you contemplate just how tragic the whole thing was. And like any good tragedy, it has the simultaneous feel of “This was so preventable! This should have been easily preventable!” and of inescapability.

Winter has a “strange habit of mind” (also the title of the first book in the series), where sometimes he will go into a “fugue state” and zone out for several minutes while his subconscious, essentially, becomes his conscious and works on a puzzle he is contemplating. As a writer and artist, I recognize this habit of mind and actually don’t find it that strange (although it doesn’t help me solve mysteries, more’s the pity). I assume that Klavan has given Winter this “strange habit” because, as an artist and writer, he also has some version of this habit. Certain kinds of mind tend to do this. Call it what you want – hyperfocus, being “in the zone.” Being an introvert. Not everyone is “on” (in the sense of externally focused) all the time.

It does make a person wonder whether this tendency, which is similar to narcolepsy, disadvantaged Winter as a spy. In fact, it makes one wonder how he ever managed to survive his espionage years. If Jason Bourne were to zone out like that even for a minute, he’d be dead. Once in House, Winter is driving somewhere and keeping an eye out for a tail. He briefly enters the fugue state, and when he comes out of it, sure enough, he is now being followed.

Yet somehow, those of us with the strange habit of mind do manage to survive. Some of us even manage to raise children. I dunno.

Anyway (shakes shoulders) aaahh, good book. Recommend. Very very sad though.