In for the Long Haul

John Wilson reviews two new novels

There are one-offs, novels that catch our eye, written by someone we haven’t read, which when we’re done don’t send us hunting for more by the same author. There are books by writers we’ve read a lot that we abandon early on or perhaps decide to give a pass based simply on the description in an advance review or a promotion; we’ll still look for the next book by the writer in question. (For me, Richard Powers falls in this category.) And then there are those we read as a matter of course (often re-reading too).

If you had asked me even five years ago, say, when I first read a novel by Michael Connelly and what was the book in question, I could have answered without hesitation; I would even have been able to recall what prompted me to do so. (Was it an interview with the author? Did the book catch my eye in an airport bookstore?) In the intervening years, my memory, once exceedingly good, has grown less reliable. I’m sure it was sometime in the late 1990s that I first read Connelly. I think the book in question was Trunk Music (1997), his sixth novel, featuring his signature creation Harry Bosch, after which I went back and read the previous books, starting with The Black Echo (1992), his first novel. But that may be wrong. In any case, since the mid-late 1990s, I’ve read all of his subsequent books as they’ve appeared. I’ve reread my way through the Bosch saga and the Lincoln Lawyer books (the two often overlapping) and, more recently, the novels featuring LAPD detective Renée Ballard. I’ve reviewed many of his books, done podcasts, given or loaned copies, talked about the Connelly world with fellow-readers (including our eldest, Anna), watched a couple of seasons of the Amazon spinoff with Wendy.

So, yes, I was all in for the new Ballard and Bosch novel, The Waiting, which also features Bosch’s daughter Maddie. I will not rehearse the plot here, except to say that it involves an infamous serial killer from the distant past (as well as another murderer of women, in the present) and, yes, murky plans for a mass shooting perhaps inspired by the same grievances that inspired the attack on the Capitol Building in January 2021. Even though all this is familiar terrain (too familiar), Connelly isn’t cynically manipulating us, his readers; one death in particular in The Waiting is a gut-punch, as it should be. If you’ve never tried one of his books, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

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Shamefully, with Andrew Klavan as with Michael Connelly I can’t remember precisely when I started reading him, though I remember the circumstances very well. Sometime in the first decade of the present century, my former professor and dear friend Edward E. Ericson, Jr. (1939-2017) asked me during one of our regular phone conversations if I had ever read Andrew Klavan. I said no—in fact, I didn’t recognize the name. Ed told me he thought I might well enjoy Klavan. That turned out to be an understatement.

Though I didn’t realize it when I was first reading him, Klavan is a fellow Christian (raised Jewish, but not religiously so, in New York City, he had converted shortly before he turned fifty). I immediately loved his fiction, and—as with Connelly, but perhaps even more so—I have left a long trail of reviews, columns, and such devoted to work. His other persona, as a satirical political jester, is not to my taste, though some of the qualities that animate that shtick are also present, in a form more congenial to me, in his fiction; consider the title of one of my favorites among his novel, Werewolf Cop. As a scourge of wokeness he has few peers, but he is much more than that.

Several years ago, as I recounted last November in the Washington Free Beacon, Otto Penzler invited Klavan to write a Christmas-themed novella for Mysterious Press. The unanticipated result of that book, When Christmas Comes, was the birth of a new series featuring Cameron Winter, who as a very young man practiced the dark arts in a secretive branch of the CIA and is now a professor of literature (specializing in the English Romantic poets) at a Midwestern university. A year ago, in conjunction with the publication of the third book in the sequence, Klavan said he hoped to live long and vigorously enough to make it a ten-book series! May it be so.

The fourth Cam Winter novel, just out, is A Woman Underground. The punning title is a clue of sorts to the flavor of this installment, in which—without at all undermining the pursuit of the questions, at once personal, metaphysical, and social-political, that animate the series—Klavan gives vent to the wacky imagination that animated his Another Kingdom trilogy. For some readers, this will be a deal-breaker; for me, it's catnip.

If you do investigate either of these writers, I’d like to hear from you; ditto if you are already a fan.