Fallen yet beautiful

A jealous teenage boy murders his girlfriend and her family and then sets fire to their luxurious home in a well-to-do suburb of Chicago. To the police it seems like an open-and-shut case, but an overly curious English professor thinks something doesn’t quite fit.

The House of Love and Death (Mysterious Press 2023) is the third installment in crime novelist and conservative commentator Andrew Klavan’s fiction series about assassin-turned-academic Cameron Winter, and it might be his best so far.

Cameron has what he calls a “strange habit of mind” that helps him to fill in gaps when confronted with a mystery. After reading about the murders, he realizes filling in the gaps leads to more questions than answers, so he begins to investigate the crime himself. Many people in the community are willing to talk to the nosy professor, but most are more concerned about their own interests than justice. Cameron’s interviews with a therapist who’s helping him understand the truth about his past life punctuate his frustrated search for the truth about the murders.

Klavan was a secular Jew for most of his life before converting to Christianity, but don’t expect this to be a safe and cozy mystery. The book isn’t explicit or graphic, but it does explore disturbing themes. Klavan’s story also offers social commentary on racism, failed government policies, and transgender confusion, but it avoids sounding preachy. One of the novel’s strengths stems from Klavan’s belief in the existence of evil. Not only is the world system evil, but individuals also have evil hearts.

Professor Winter, the former assassin, inhabits two worlds: the ugly world of violent murder and the beautiful world of romantic poetry. Depravity pervades his story—including some of Winter’s own making—but Klavan injects light and grace into the darkness. By the end, The House of Love and Death becomes a metaphor for our own fallen yet beautiful world, in which the only hope is sacrificial love.