A Strange Habit of Mind (Cameron Winter Mysteries)
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Edgar winner Klavan's subpar sequel to 2021's When Christmas Comes finds Cameron Winter, who once worked for a covert government entity called the Division, now a literature professor at a Midwestern university after blackmailing the dean about "things the dean wanted to keep hidden until the end of the world." Winter is troubled by the suicide of a former student, Adam Kemp, who jumped from the roof of his San Francisco apartment building right after texting Winter, "Help me." Winter, who defended Kemp against a date rape charge and is curious why Kemp hadn't waited a few minutes for a response to the text, travels to California to investigate. Though he accepts the official verdict of suicide, Winter comes to believe that a powerful tech titan, an in-law of Kemp's girlfriend, played a role in the death. The lead's special gift—to suddenly understand puzzling motives and actions after he "slipped without warning into a silent state akin to meditation"—isn't distinctive enough to make the character memorable. Klavan fails to make the conceit of a guilt-ridden intelligence operative turned academic plausible.
