Andrew Klavan’s ‘The Kingdom of Cain’ Is His Most Personal Yet
from Our Editors
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Andrew Klavan
In “The Kingdom of Cain,” Andrew Klavan continues his Cameron Winter series with a story that threads thriller and theology into something quieter than spectacle but no less intense. A cold-case investigation into a murdered college professor quickly becomes a meditation on the cultural costs of moral relativism.
What sets this book apart is its spiritual depth. Klavan — once a secular novelist — describes the story as “an attempt to write a novel that explores the meaning of our crisis without being didactic.” Rather than turning away from darkness, he examines it as someone who found faith on the far side of it. “I don’t write books to push a message,” he’s said. “I write them to tell the truth as I see it.”
Though it’s his most overtly Christian work to date, “The Kingdom of Cain” doesn’t preach. It wrestles. In a time when many are tempted to flatten stories into slogans, Klavan takes a different risk: writing a detective novel where the mystery beneath the murder is spiritual. What does it mean to live in a world that rejects truth? And how does belief endure when everything around it has been hollowed out?
