A Strange Habit of Mind

English professor and ex-spy Cameron Winter confronts a Big Tech billionaire to solve the suspicious suicide of a former student.

The world of Big Tech is full of eccentric characters, but shamanic billionaire Gerald Byrne may be the strangest of the bunch. Known for dabbling in esoteric spiritual practices, the founder of the global social media platform Byrner is universally admired as a visionary, philanthropist, and devoted husband and father. And every person who gets in the way of his good work seems to die.

When a former student commits suicide, English professor and ex-spy Cameron Winter takes it upon himself to understand why, and to make sense of the fact that, after a prolonged silence following the young man’s expulsion from the university, he reached out to his teacher with two words just before taking the fatal plunge from the roof of his San Francisco apartment: “Help me.”

Winter has what he calls “a strange habit of mind”—the ability to imagine himself into a crime scene, to reconstruct it mentally and play through various possible causes and outcomes to understand exactly what took place. When he applies this exercise to Adam Kemp’s desperate final moments, he discovers a troubling inconsistency. And when he learns that Kemp was in a tumultuous relationship with Gerald Byrne’s niece, he begins to suspect that the suicide was the result of a carefully-engineered plot, put in motion by the powerful businessman.

Andrew Klavan is a superb entertainer, and his work has real substance.”
—Dean Koontz

The most original American novelist of crime and suspense since Cornell Woolrich.”
—Stephen King

A STRANGE HABIT OF MIND is a great, hard-boiled-style novel that provides readers with an extremely satisfying look at modern-day San Francisco through the eyes of a protagonist who is quite different from most you encounter in the mystery genre.”
—Book Reporter

Andrew Klavan is the author of such internationally bestselling crime novels as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood; Don’t Say A Word, filmed starring Michael Douglas; Empire of Lies; and Werewolf Cop. He has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award five times and has won twice. His political satire videos have been viewed by tens of millions of people, and he currently does a popular podcast The Andrew Klavan Show at the Daily Wire.

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