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. The founder of Byrner, a global social media platform, Byrne is known for speaking with vague profundity and for dabbling in esoteric spiritual practices; he wears his hair in a long black ponytail to reveal a large flower tattooed on his neck; he's universally admired as a visionary, a philanthropist, and a 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. The young man had been expelled from university in an unfortunate episode that left Winter sympathetic to his plight; after a prolonged silence, he reached out to his teacher with two words just before taking a 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, Winter begins to suspect that the death was actually suicide-by-assassination and the result of a carefully-engineered plot put in motion by the powerful businessman. Cameron Winter is the tough-but-learned protagonist first introduced in Klavan's bestselling 2021's When Christmas Comes (Mysterious Press, 2021); he has rapidly become a beloved hero deserving of a series all his own. A STRANGE HABIT OF MIND is a thrilling mystery set in the cutthroat world of tech money and tech influence, where unchecked fortunes produce unstoppable power for a lawless few. Andrew Klavan is the author of such internationally bestselling crime novels as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood, "Don't Say A Word," starring Michael Douglas, Empire of Lies and Werewolf Cop. He is a 5-time Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award noninee and a 2-time winner. He wrote the screenplays for "A Shock to The System," starring Michael Caine, "One Missed Call," starring Edward Burns, and "Gosnell: The Trial of America's Biggest Serial Killer," starring Dean Cain. Klavan's 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. He is also the author of a memoir about his religious journey The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ. His fantasy-suspense trilogy Another Kingdom was among the top 100 podcasts.