A Killer in the Wind by Andrew Klavan

 

I read something by Klavan a while ago, it was more of an explicitly Christian very YA-seeming novel that seemed strangely unwilling to commit to there being at least one actual angel in it, and I found it strangely disappointing in spite of the prose itself beinga t times quite good. This is not that, what Christian references there are much more subtle, the morality is much grayer, it's not at all unwilling to commit to anything, and the prose is still quite good (there are some truly delicious turns of phrase scattered throughout). The story is perhaps a little loopy--I'm not sure I buy the psychological/pharmaceutical stuff--but it's easy enough to just decide to swallow it, and the novel holds together more than well enough once you make that choice. The characters are mostly believable (oddly, the 1st-person POV narrator is in some ways the least believable character in the book, see my comments about psychology and pharmaceuticals) and the events move along rapidly and smoothly. This seems to have a lot in common, thematically and otherwise, with at least some of Andrew Vachss' novels; it gets grim, but there is at least vengeance if not exactly a happy ending. Not perfect, but very good.