A Wall Street Journal holiday gift book selection A sleuthing English teacher will need a Christmas miracle to prove a condemned man innocent in this "terrific holiday-themed novel" ( Publishers Weekly Starred Review) from Edgar Award-winner Andrew Klavan. Colorful Christmas lights dapple the family homes in the idyllic lakeside town of Sweet Haven when Jennifer Dean, a young librarian at the local elementary school, is brutally murdered. There are witnesses and her boyfriend Travis Blake confesses to the crime… but something doesn’t quite add up. Blake is a third generation Army Ranger, awarded the Silver Star for his heroism in Afghanistan―how could a beloved son of this tight-knit burgh commit such a grisly deed? As a community of military families a few miles down the road from an Army base, no one in Sweet Haven wants to investigate a war hero like Blake, not even the top brass at the police department. In steps Cameron Winter, a rugged and lonesome English professor haunted by the ghosts of his own Christmas past, whose former lover asks him to prove Blake innocent. The Sweet Haven murder reverberates in his mind, echoing a horrific yuletide memory from his youth, and Winter knows there are darker powers at play here than a simple domestic dispute. If he can solve this small-town mystery, just maybe he can find peace from his inner demons as well. The thirty-sixth novel by two-time Edgar Award winner Andrew Klavan, When Christmas Comes is a seasonal tale of tradition, family, and murder; its chilling twists are best experienced curled up beside a burning Yule log.

USA Today bestseller English professor and ex-spy Cameron Winter confronts a Big Tech billionaire to solve the suspicious suicide of a former student The world of Big Tech is full of eccentric characters, but shamanic billionaire Gerald Byrne may be the strangest of the bunch. The founder of Byrner, a global social media platform, Byrne is known for speaking with vague profundity and for dabbling in esoteric spiritual practices; he wears his hair in a long black ponytail to reveal a large flower tattooed on his neck; he’s universally admired as a visionary, a philanthropist, and a devoted husband and father. And every person who gets in the way of his good work seems to die. When a former student commits suicide, English professor and ex-spy Cameron Winter takes it upon himself to understand why. The young man was expelled from the university in an unfortunate episode that left Winter sympathetic to his plight; after a prolonged silence, he reached out to his teacher with two words just before taking the fatal plunge from the roof of his San Francisco apartment: “Help me.” Winter has what he calls “a strange habit of mind”―the ability to imagine himself into a crime scene, to reconstruct it mentally and play through various possible causes and outcomes to understand exactly what took place. When he applies this exercise to Adam Kemp’s desperate final moments, he discovers a troubling inconsistency. And when he learns that Kemp was in a tumultuous relationship with Gerald Byrne’s niece, he begins to suspect that the suicide was the result of a carefully-engineered plot, put in motion by the powerful businessman. Featuring the tough-but-learned protagonist from 2021’s When Christmas Comes, A Strange Habit of Mind is a thrilling mystery set in the cutthroat world of tech money and tech influence, where unchecked fortunes produce unstoppable power for a lawless few.

When a family is murdered in a wealthy Chicago suburb, English professor Cameron Winters asks the questions that the police aren’t willing to. Professor Cameron Winters is well known for having a sense about crime. His background as a former spy and his current work investigating themes and motives in literature give him unique insight into why a crime might have occurred and who had the reason to commit it. Which is why he can’t resist getting involved after reading a puzzling news story about a wealthy family killed in the small town of Maidenvale. 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 to have settled on a simple explanation and the most obvious suspect, but something isn’t adding up. While Winters’s investigation is welcomed by many who knew the victims, Inspector Roland Strange makes it clear he not only wants Winters to stop looking for answers, but to stay out of his town altogether. Winters begins to understand why as he slowly uncovers crimes and unsavory behavior that had been ignored long before the killings. But this only makes him more determined to find the real killer and expose the rot that is hiding behind the town’s sanitized façade. At the same time Winters is trying to uncover the truth of the killings, he is also coming clean with his therapist about the greatest sin he has committed in his own life—an experience from his time as a spy that has become a burden he carries into each new scenario.

Ex-spy, English professor, and sleuth Cameron Winter finds his past and present colliding as he tracks his first love in the newest entry in the USA Today bestselling series. Cameron Winter can’t stop thinking about the first girl he ever loved, Charlotte. His unresolved feelings for her have prevented him from truly moving forward with anyone new even all of these decades later. In an effort to distract himself—and his therapist—from his romantic struggles, Cameron instead begins to recount a story from his time as a CIA operative when he was sent on a mission to find a missing colleague last seen at the villa of a notorious Turkish sex trafficker. It has been years since he traveled the world for the government, but he is still troubled by this particular case. Now working as an English professor, Winter seeks a quiet life—except when his “strange habit of mind,” his penchant for sleuthing, leads him to investigate crimes whose complexity excites his curiosity.When a mysterious visitor turns Winter’s attention to a book that appears to detail what happened to Charlotte he realizes he might be able to find and save her. The dark tale, filled with White Nationalist rhetoric, disturbing characters, and cold-blooded murder has him worried for her life. But how much of this story is true? Why does someone want him to investigate? And what is it about this current investigation that has him thinking about that missing spy those many years ago? In his most personal case yet, Winter must delve deep into his past to confront a dangerous threat lurking in his present.Like previous entries featuring this “complex and determined” series character (BookReporter), A Woman Underground harnesses multiple Edgar Award-winning author Andrew Klavan’s crime writing expertise to explore some of the biggest issues facing us today. The result is a poignant page turner with an intricate plot, shot through with high stakes action and unflinching humanity.