In Klein’s novel, a group of estranged middle-aged Californians reunite as expatriates in Mexico.

Seven years ago, two unmarried couples—Jack Carter and Chloe, and Owen Brookes and Anna—were the best of friends. They lived it up in beach towns around San Diego and took trips together to Baja California. After Jack and Anna had a brief sexual tryst, both couples split up, and the four went their separate ways. Since then, former journalist Jack became a bestselling novelist, while Owen made his name as a photographer braving war zones for Time magazine. When Owen shows up unexpectedly on Jack’s porch in Del Mar, California, Jack is initially anxious, but the two immediately fall back into an easy friendship. Owen has a month off from work, and he convinces Jack to get the rest of the gang back together for a trip to Rosarito, Mexico—just like in the old days. Anna, now a wealthy, recently divorced mother of two, agrees to come, as does Chloe, now a successful painter. “Everything was exactly as I remembered it,” Jack marvels while describing Rosarito. “This was Mexico and Mexico does not change, the world merely evolves around it…” The trip is so enjoyable that the group persuade themselves that the expat life in Mexico is what they need to be happy. With Anna’s kids in tow, the reconciled couples resettle in the small Yucatan village of San Rafael. At first, Jack loves it—he’s writing up a storm—but then Owen convinces him to put his journalism hat back on and investigate some fighting in nearby Chiapas, which separates the group. Have things really changed for these old friends, or are they fooling themselves?

Klein’s muscular prose will appeal to fans of a certain tradition of American fiction; the story is apparently set in modern times, but Jack and the other characters often speak and narrate as if they’re in an Ernest Hemingway novel: “ ‘Anna’s a damn good woman,’ I said. ‘Damn good. Too good for the likes of me. Funny, but I’ve been haunted my whole life by kind and good women.’ A sudden feeling of ablution flushed through me as I membered the innumerable days Owen and I had talked about such things.” Those who aren’t fans of this style, though, may find that Jack and Owen’s opinions about what’s wrong with the world and the people in it aren’t very scintillating. It’s a short novel at a little more than 130 pages in length, and its narrative moves along quickly. However, the balance of the story feels skewed; there’s far too much about Jack’s history at the San Diego Sun and his memories of his absent father, for example, and not nearly enough about his relationship with Chloe. Just as its characters are essentially playing at being expats, one may feel that book is playing at being a Graham Greene or Malcolm Lowry opus—evoking such works’ moods and concerns without providing their underlying pathos.

An earnest but ultimately underdeveloped pastiche.

Klein (Frankie Jones, 2016) offers a haunted-house tale with a twist.

Michael and Audrey Felton are looking for a place where they can get away from Houston and their work as professors at Monclair University and relax out in the country. When Michael finds an old, sturdy house in the tiny town of Krivac, Texas, it seems perfect. It’s not too far from work, but it’s still a place where they can be alone—or so they think when they buy it, cheap, from a real estate agent friend. From the beginning, Michael thinks something is off about the place but shrugs it off as superstition. However, after he and Audrey move in, they find a secret room, and they start hearing from townspeople that the previous owners, the Ostermanns, may have trapped people there—when they weren’t having large meetings late at night in the fields beyond the Native American burial ground. Then things start moving around the house, windows are broken one minute and fixed the next, and Charlie Blacek, an elderly neighbor, seems to appear and disappear at will. As the mystery deepens, Michael and Audrey must figure out if what’s going on is the result of some kind of conspiracy. The book starts out with a lot of run-of-the-mill haunted-house tropes—the new people in town buying an old, isolated house, things going bump in the night, and so on. But it turns an unexpected corner just shy of the halfway point, after which readers will find themselves questioning every new discovery—and that’s when Klein really makes the story engaging. He does have a tendency to overwrite, though; for instance, he describes the couple “being trapped with a loquacious real estate agent for four or five bromidic hours.” But this stylistic quirk becomes less noticeable as the story becomes more engrossing.

What starts out as a standard ghost story becomes a fun, unpredictable thriller.

In Klein’s debut novel, a man travels across the country and around the world, searching for happiness and meaning in his life.

After starting out with pitifully few advantages, Frankie Jones enjoys a charmed life as an adult. As a baby, he’s abandoned by his father and orphaned a few years later when his mother dies in a factory fire. At age 16, he leaves his orphanage and gets a busboy job in a St. Louis diner, where he’s mentored by a blues-playing cook and his family. He eventually saves enough money to travel abroad, and he goes on to visit 32 different countries; he also has some love affairs along the way. When he tires of roaming, he returns to the United States and goes to college, where he earns a degree in journalism. In Boston, while working as a newspaper reporter, he meets Mercedes Brewster, the woman he will later consider to be the love of his life. Although they’re from different backgrounds—she’s blue-blooded, and he calls himself the “bastard son of a pauper with no history at all”—it doesn’t stop them from falling in love. But soon his restlessness compels him to travel across the country to take a reporting job in San Diego. There, he pines for Mercedes but finds new opportunities for love and friendship, which leads to a betrayal. As Frankie deals with the consequences of his actions, he contemplates the nuanced differences between elusive happiness and attainable contentment. Klein conveys philosophical ideas with beautifully crafted prose and vivid descriptions, such as “A biting mad-dog wind snapped down the street mean as a blister” and “I watched blindly as the orange sun drowned itself in the ocean and the sky fizzled with sparklers of every shade.” The story, told from a distinctly male point of view, has echoes of the work of Ernest Hemingway, particularly during its spearfishing sequences, which are set in Baja California, Mexico. Frankie also comes across as likable, despite his issues with identity and commitment, and although he discusses much with his friends and lovers, much is left unresolved—as often happens in real life.

An introspective tale of self-discovery that’s worth reading for its lyricism and insights.