AND THE DEAD SHALL LIVE

A famous mystery author who’s spiraling downward agrees to hunt for a real murderer, hoping the search will result in a blockbuster book.

In Klein’s suspense novel, Kit Wheaton corners author and New Yorker Philip Raymond. She asks him to do what California private investigators and police couldn’t: Find who’s responsible for her teenage daughter Paige’s death. Kit explains to Raymond: “Your stories are as real as life. And you understand people, you see though them, and into them.” A photograph taken before Paige wound up dead on a California beach shows the teen in bed with a man whose face is obscured. Raymond enlarges the picture and discovers the word Rosebudnotched in the bed’s wooden headboard. Digging into the internet, he learns that politically connected billionaire Lee Fletcher owns a yacht by that name. Raymond figures if he could “tie Fletcher to the death of Paige Wheaton, that would make quite a book.” Suffering from anxiety stemming from the loss of his reputation and his wife and son, who moved to California, Raymond realizes he can’t investigate Fletcher alone. The author hires Jesse Carter, an attractive law school dropout, to double as his assistant and as bait for Fletcher. Carter has her own issues, stemming from a family tragedy. Now living hand-to-mouth in a Greenwich Village walk-up, she hooks up with Fletcher. A truly bad man, he takes a page from the playbook of Jeffrey Epstein, the multimillionaire sex offender linked to underage girls. Fletcher calls his girls “celestials.” “This is a kind of weird vibe,” says one of them at a gathering. The same could be said of this novel, which includes drug use in coffins, “jizz-stained pants,” and a surplus of hypodermic needles. Descriptions can be rich, such as the one of Fletcher having “something brawling and feral about him, something dangerous, that seemed to want to burst.” Or they can be perplexing: “His nose jutted out like a tiny fist.” Raymond’s repeated phrase, “Man plans and God laughs,” wears a bit thin. But the book expertly unspools the backstories of Raymond and Carter, blending them into their present-day search for a predator. And as a New York resident, Klein convincingly guides his characters around the city.

An absorbing tale of damaged souls struggling to heal as they track down evil.