In a passage from Ezekiel, the Old Testament prophet offers a message from God to His people, Israel—”I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
It’s a promise for their good, but it comes at a cost. Flesh feels pain; stone doesn’t. And the new heart will “remember its evil ways and wicked deeds, and [it] will loathe [itself] for its sins.”
Cameron Winter, the poetry professor who moonlights as a detective in Andrew Klavan’s eponymous mystery series, is familiar with that kind of loathing. As an assassin for an intelligence agency known only as the Division, he was, by his own admission, “dead inside. Cold as ice.” Now, years removed from government service, Winter is only too aware of the ravages his past actions have wreaked on his soul. So he’s once again putting his…
