February, month of Posts of Stuff I Love, continues with the category “novels by Andrew Klavan” for 500. What I didn’t anticipate was the way that putting title and author together would make the author sound a bit like a serial killer. Anyway … onward!

Here is Andrew Klavan, known by some as “hot Gandalf.” (No, I’m not kidding.) Ironically, given that he is a fiction writer, my first discovery of Andrew Klavan came through his autobiography, The Great Good Thing, where he chronicled his journey from tough, noir-loving Jewish kid from Long Island to tough, Jesus-loving Jewish geezer from California. Klavan always loved the old-school tough-guy private-eye stories and aspired to write more of them. He got really good at tension, pacing, and action scenes. He’s also good at psychology, and particularly loves stories where the character isn’t sure he can trust his own mind.

Now, in his golden years and arguably at the peak of his art, Klavan is finally writing a mystery series. (His other novels have been stand-alones, plus movie scripts and a fantasy trilogy.)

The hero of this series is Cameron Winter, a former poor little rich boy and former spook whose Apollonian good looks and tweedy job as an English professor do a poor job of hiding the fact that he is still a dangerous man. Because this is by Klavan, about 30% of each novel is spent in Winter’s shrink’s office, where we find out through a series of sessions about different aspects of Winter’s tragic past. In the very first book, we heard that Winter’s childhood crush was Charlotte Schaefer, the daughter of his German-immigrant nanny. Winter has been looking back on Young Charlotte as his feminine ideal, and kind of not really growing up partly as a consequence of the Ghost of Charlotte. In this book, Winter finally has to deal with that. He has to go to the aid of the real Charlotte. But time has been flowing for her, too, of course, and Real Charlotte has her own ghosts.

(By the way, A Woman Underground is book 4 in the series, but I had to go crawling on my hands and knees to Amazon to find this out. Please, Mysterious Press, put the book numbers in a prominent place both on the spine and on the title page!)

I won’t give anything further away, but like all Klavans, the book weaves through time, giving us satisfying action in several different forms: international spy games, local mystery that is really none of Winter’s business, sentimental looks at the way things used to be … or did they? Plus a psychologically satisfying twist at the end.

You may wonder, since this is a series, do you have to read the earlier books first? No, you don’t, because Klavan does a fine job making each book work on its own. However, just in case you want to, here they are:

• #1 When Christmas Comes
• #2 A Strange Habit of Mind
• #3 The House of Love and Death

So, what do you think? Do these sound like something you would like? Are you also in favor of book numbers being put on spines? Let me know in the comments!