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A Killer in the Wind Hardcover – January 8, 2013


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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 304 pages
  • Publisher: Mysterious Press (January 8, 2013)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0802120679
  • ISBN-13: 978-0802120670
  • Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (74 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #841,352 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Three years ago, Dan Champion, when he was an undercover vice cop for the NYPD, broke up a child-sex slavery ring. But the case cracked Champion, and now he’s a detective in small-town, exurban New York, still wrestling with delusions about a dead child who follows him around and a beautiful woman who wasn’t real. But, in fact, the beautiful woman was real, and she turns up almost dead in Champion’s small town. Soon, two ghostly assassins try to kill him, and he must grapple with his instabilities while trying to track down the Fat Woman, the titular killer in the wind, and her assassins. The prolific Klavan (The Identity Man, 2010) spends too many pages on Champion’s inner demons and many more attempting to build a sense of apocalyptic, near-cosmic menace. But when Champion finally faces the Fat Woman, we learn that the only cosmic thing about her is her banality. That said, if readers slog through the first 200 pages, they will surely stick it out to the end. --Thomas Gaughan

Review

"If you haven’t read Andrew Klavan, you’re in for a treat. He tells vivid stories with a conversational style that’s deceptively simple but does not waste a word."—Charlotte Observer

“Evokes the gritty classics of Cornell Woolrich and Jim Thompson while spinning its own brand of hard-boiled psychological suspense. Among its other distinctions, this book gives us a detective who is tough enough to outlast the most bizarre encounters but isn't too tough to be gripped with fear.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Taut, frightening . . . The edgy story complements a lead character whose fragile memory can’t always separate the real from the imaginary.”—Publishers Weekly

"Dark, violent, seasoned with wit and fueled by anger."—Books and Culture

“Klavan is worthy to be mentioned with Keith Ablow, Jonathan Kellerman, Andrew Vachss, James Patterson, and even Stephen King.”—Huntington News

Customer Reviews

Corky and a bit too much .
Elva Beaupre
Mr. Klavan is masterful at weaving all this into a well crafted story with an amazing cast of both redemptive and evil characters.
Robert C. Olson
It is a good story that reads at a fast pace and keeps you wanting more.
James A. Nichols

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful By Kevin L. Nenstiel TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on December 26, 2012
Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )
Inspector Dan Champion, ex-NYPD, dedicated his career to busting a child prostitution ring led by the enigmatic Fat Woman. But he shot a suspect in a narcotic haze, ending the investigation. Creative perjury saved his career, but now he works patrol upstate. Worse, he battles lingering hallucinations, especially lovely Samantha, who nursed him to health. So when Samantha washes up in his new jurisdiction, he cannot explain how his hallucinations have bled into reality.

Edgar Award-winning mystery novelist Andrew Klavan spends the first hundred pages of his newest novel spinning an intricate web of conspiracy, denial, and phantasmagoria. Then he spends the next two hundred pages squandering it. He heightens readers' expectations through a solid premise and brief hints that he might upend genre expectations. Then he fritters his premise away and hits us with a boilerplate thriller dirty with the fingerprints of 1987.

The problems begin with first-person protagonist Dan Champion himself. He walks, talks, and thinks like second-tier Robert Mitchum antihero. In the first chapter, he hits us with this narrative fragment: "My heart was knocking at my ribs like a cop's fist on a whorehouse door." Though this tapers off by the final third, and he starts talking like a person, he never completely stops comporting himself like a postwar noir refugee.

When Champion finds himself confronted with a woman who cannot exist, he misses the most important clues because he fails to grasp that the investigation is really all about him. This character is completely immune to introspection. Late in the book, Champion's part-time squeeze has to practically grab his lapels and scream at him that he needs to look inward.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful By Brian Baker VINE VOICE on January 6, 2013
Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )
I had a lot of fun reading Andrew Klavan's latest, "Killer in the Wind". Klavan's a very experienced and talented wordsmith, a two-time winner of the Edgar Award, and he's crafted an almost Gothic tale of murder, revenge, amnesia and kiddie sexploitation.

Dan Champion's a top-tier NYPD detective on the Vice Squad when he investigates a kiddie-sex ring that becomes an obsession to him. He ultimately breaks the case, but the case also breaks him, leaving him a shattered man forced out of his position with the NYPD and into a job with the police department of a small, rural town.

He's haunted by delusions and dreams of a dead kid and a beautiful woman, as well as a continuing obsession with a faceless Fat Woman whom he believes is the mastermind behind everything that's befallen him.

He also inexplicably finds himself the target of a team of professional killers, and when the woman about whom he'd been dreaming suddenly appears in real life, his world is turned upside-down. He has to dig deep into the past to discover the source of his delusions, and why his dreams are suddenly becoming real.

Klavan handles this all deftly, with both noir and pulp overtones, creating a delightful blend of genres. Are we dealing with the supernatural? The psychological? What?

His characterizations are vivid; his protagonist is a guy you root for right from the first page; his villains are deadly and dastardly. In the main killer, he's created a truly unique and scary Bad Guy.

And don't look for a fairy tale ending, either. That's all I'll say on that.

My only nit to pick is that by the time we actually meet the Fat Woman, I thought her to be a bit disappointingly pedestrian.

Thoroughly enjoyable. Well done.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful By Amazon Customer VINE VOICE on March 6, 2013
Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )
Several years prior to the main action of Klavan’s latest, troubled New York City vice cop Dan Champion is involved in a case which shakes him to his core, causing him to question his career, his integrity, and his sanity. Trying to escape his traumatizing past, he eventually settles in what he refers to as “my little corner of downstate New York,” which, for a time, proves to have a slower, more understandable, way of life. There, he's allowed to do what he does best--catch crooks and put them in jail--a talent which Klavan immediately puts on display in the book's initial pages.

After three years away from NYC, Champion begins to relax his guard, believing he might have finally found a place in the world where he fits in, where he can pursue a satisfying career, and, perhaps, settle down with a woman he's almost ready to admit he loves. But, one terrible night, his past catches up with him, and he finds himself involved in a war against ferocious adversaries whose only goal is to see him dead. It's kill or be killed, with Champion constantly on the run. To conquer his foes, he must dig deep into painful, hazy memories of his recent and not so recent past.

Klavan has few peers when it comes to writing this kind of novel, a frenetic thriller designed to keep you turning the pages until you, and Champion, ultimately learn the truth. He ups the ante considerably by having his story told in the first person by Champion, a different kind of unreliable narrator, not someone with something to hide, but someone who, because of his troubled past, is simply incapable of remembering facts which might end up saving his life.
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