When Christmas Comes (Cameron Winter #1)

by Andrew Klavan

Mia lived in a small suburb about half an hour out of the city. The houses were modest there but fiercely respectable. Lawns mown. Windows washed. This was a neighborhood of people who had got a fingerhold on the middle class and they weren’t going to let go of it come hell or high water.

He’d known too many men who’d gone down that hole, who’d been dragged down it, a smiling devil clutching their throats.

She was like her house, he thought. Hidden behind slogans and bumper-sticker thought formulas. Broken and neglected like the house, but once fine. He taught at a college, after all; a pierced tongue and tattoos and defiant cant was not a disguise that could hide much from him. He suspected he was looking at a young girl in terrible emotional pain, too much pain for her to come out into life and engage with its complexities.

He watched May’s profile as she went on gazing out the window. The haircut was like a sign of penance, he thought. The piercings were the act of a flagellant. The made-to-be-sweet face wore her inner agonies plainly once you knew to look for them.

“We Russians, you see, we have believed in everything—the tsar and the church and the socialists and the capitalists—and it has all gone wrong for us, one thing after another, and now there is nothing left to believe. So we are like Oblonsky and believe in nothing except the old savageries.