The Mysterious Press
The Mysterious Press
The Mysterious Press
A nightmarish psychological thriller about a disgraced, mentally unstable cop whose past comes back to haunt him when he comes face-to-face with a woman he believed existed only in his mind.
Stephen King has called Andrew Klavan “the most original American novelist of crime and suspense since Cornell Woolrich,” and A Killer in the Wind displays Klavan’s unmatched talent for pairing gripping thrillers with unforgettable characters. Three years ago, Dan Champion uncovered a criminal syndicate run by a kingpin known only as the Fat Woman. Champion infiltrated her world of murder, obsession, and perversity. But the case also broke him, and Champion began taking drugs and hallucinating . . . a dead child prowling the streets of New York . . . a beautiful woman named Samantha he loved–if only she’d been real.
Now Champion is a small-town detective, hoping the ghosts and hallucinations are finally behind him. Then one night Champion is called to examine the body of a woman who has washed ashore. Yet he recognizes the woman as Samantha, the woman he dreamed about long ago . . . a woman who doesn’t exist.
Soon Champion is haunted by a team of expert killers who want to make sure he never finds the truth: about the dead child who wanders through his imagination, the lover who inhabits his dreams, and a killer who has been on the run for a lifetime. The ghosts of the dead are all around him, and Champion has to find out who murdered them, or he could become one of them himself.
“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
“After reading his latest, A Killer in the Wind I came away convinced that Klavan is worthy to be mentioned with Keith Ablow, Jonathan Kellerman, Andrew Vachss, James Patterson, and even Stephen King.” —The Huntington News
“Dark, violent, seasoned with wit and fueled by anger.” —Books and Culture
An Amazon Best of the Month Pick (January 2013)
A Books and Culture Favorite Book of the Year
Emory’s weak, round features were wild with terror. His green eyes lanced laser-like at me out of their folds of flesh, burning with terror and with rage. “Traitor!” he shrieked.
I pointed my gun at him. “Who’s the Fat Woman?” I said.
My voice sounded bizarre in my own ears, drawn out and distorted like a recording played back at slow speed. I was drowning in the feverish atmosphere down here. I was losing myself in it, falling away from myself, farther and farther away.
“You think you’re Justice?” Emory screamed—at least that’s what I remember. He started to cry. “You’re a traitor to everything!”
But his voice was growing distorted. He was slipping off into the atmosphere, slipping away from me. Both of us were lost and swirling in the swirling and unreal confusion that crossed and erased the borderlines between me and the world I saw.
The rest is all like that, all darkness and confusion, all mist and smoke and bright white gleaming lights and the choking stench—all of it filling me up with darkness—filling up all reality with darkness—so that reality and I became one dark thing, darkness itself, darkness alone.
I think Emory went on screaming in that darkness. I’m not sure. I don’t remember.
I don’t even remember killing him.
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