A Woman Underground by Andrew Klavan

Published by Mysterious Press on October 15, 2024

A Woman Underground begins with a prologue, but it is the prologue to Treachery in the Night, a self-published novel that portrays white nationalists as the nation’s saviors. A character named Miranda is living with a brute named Theo before a bigger brute named Moran marches Theo into the woods and returns to claim Miranda as his prize.

Cameron Winter believes that Miranda is modeled on a girl he loved before he was old enough to understand the emotion. Winter arrives at this conclusion after recognizing the girl’s perfume outside his door and then glimpsing someone in a security video who might or might not be his old flame Charlotte. The woman is carrying a book with a partially exposed title. Winter matches the partial cover to Treachery in the Night, starts reading the book, and concludes for no obvious reason that Miranda is Charlotte. Winter rides an improbable logic train, but improbability is the norm in modern thrillers.

Winter is an English professor who formerly worked as a spy or assassin for one of those shadowy government agencies that are a thriller staple. Winter is a broken man. He meets regularly with Margaret Whitaker, a therapist who presumably has a security clearance. She replaced a therapist who fell in love with Winter. Margaret is also in love with him, making me think that Winter must be quite the hunk — or that women just dig assassins.

Despite her feelings about Winter, Margaret wants him to make a date with a woman who asked him to ask her out. She believes his obsession with Charlotte is preventing him from moving forward with a potential relationship. Most people abandon their childhood crushes when they reach adulthood, but Winter can’t for reasons that Margeret articulates after reaching deep into her bag of packaged explanations for stupid behavior.

Winter decides he needs to track down Charlotte, so there we have a plot. The endeavor brings him into contact with white nationalists and other disreputable people. The story takes place against a vague background of riots, violent clashes between left and right in unidentified cities.

Winter’s search for Charlotte is interwoven with a story from his past involving a search for Jerry Collins, an agent who disappeared while investigating child traffickers. Jerry’s disappearance relates to his knowledge of powerful men sleeping with kids — so many powerful men that they would fill Jeffrey Epstein’s island, but men with an appetite for sex partners who are even younger than Epstein’s. Frankly, the novel’s portrayal of nearly all powerful men as child molesters defied my usual willingness to accept the unbelievable for the sake of enjoying a thriller.

The story takes an odd turn when Cameron learns that his colleague, Roger Sexton, is carrying on with a student who makes a habit of shagging faculty. Cameron is too virtuous to sleep with a student, or perhaps he’s so hung up on his teen crush that other women fail to activate his libido. In any event, Roger’s dalliance with the student becomes an increasingly bizarre component of the plot and takes center stage when the student disappears. The circumstances of her disappearance again strained the limits of my willingness to get lost in the story.

Andrew Klavan has an addiction to adverbs that requires serious treatment. His prose is competent but unpolished. The pop psychology upon which Winter’s personality is based is probably needed to explain Winter’s obsession with Charlotte, but at least he has a personality. The wannabe Nazi characters are cartoonish, although I suppose that characterization might be accurate. Most members of America’s far right are not serious people.

Apart from its credibility issues, the plot is muddy. The major components — the search for Jerry, the search for Charlotte, and the drama that arises out of Roger’s sexual involvement with a student — do not fit together well. Roger’s plot thread comes across as filler that is included to pad the word count. On the other hand, a final twist in the epilogue is satisfying. While the story will probably maintain the interest of thriller fans, I doubt that they will become invested in plot threads that, in the end, just don’t make much sense.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS