The Shifting Sands of Justice: Walter B. Levis’ "The Meaning of the Murder"

By Tony Huang

The Meaning of the Murder, by Walter B. Levis (Anaphora Literary Press, August 2025)

What happens when your entire purpose—your North Star—is justice itself… and then the very notion of justice begins to dissolve beneath your feet? In his stunning new novel, The Meaning of the Murder (August 2025), Walter B. Levis plunges us into a labyrinth where truth is slippery, and every answer yields a thicket of deeper, darker questions.

This is not your average detective story. Levis seizes the crime novel template and shatters it, presenting us instead with a bruising meditation on memory, loss, and the fraught machinery of justice, both public and heartbreakingly private.

We follow Eliana Golden, a tenacious yet tormented NYPD detective whose life has been defined––and quietly corroded––by her father Neil’s unsolved murder. Neil, more than just a parent, was a compliance officer who uncovered rot at the heart of one of the world’s largest banks: links to terror, political intrigue, and a conspiracy stretching from Manhattan to the Catskills and far beyond. The legacy of his death claws at Eliana’s conscience; “Justice! That’s why!” her father’s last echo, becomes a mantra and a curse.

Levis excels at opening up the fragile interior landscapes of his characters. Eliana is a figure shaped by conflict—between police procedure and personal vendetta, sisterly duty and self-preservation, cynicism and a vestigial hope that meaning can be found after atrocity. Chronic migraines torment her—a barometer of her chronic refusal to turn away from pain. The web of secondary characters, from her ex-husband Danny, the “tough cop, good cop,” to her haunted sister Charlotte, are rendered with shades of vulnerability and grit.

But it’s the enigmatic Vachik Savoyian—former spy, philosopher, fatalist—who gives the novel its raw, magnetic charge. Through his chilling rituals and mercenary wisdom, Levis interrogates the nature of utility, the seductions of violence, and the spiritual cost of living as both instrument and casualty of covert games. Savoyian is both Eliana’s adversary and, in an especially unsettling twist, her ally. When the long-buried secret of Neil Golden’s murder is finally exhumed, the truth is anything but cathartic.

The encounter between Eliana and Savoyian is mesmerizing in its ambiguity. Revenge, Levis reminds us, is rarely pure; in the end, Eliana’s quest mutates from personal retribution to a grim pursuit of systemic accountability. The lines between right and wrong, justice and vengeance, become not only blurred, but almost unrecognizable.

The Meaning of the Murder is a novel obsessed with synchronicity—those “meaningful coincidences” Carl Jung wrote of, threading its narrative like ominous music. Levis circles questions of agency and fate, of whether the cosmic scales balance or simply tilt inexorably toward further chaos. Family, ethnicity, trauma, love: nothing is static, nothing is spared the storm.

What lingers most after the final page is the suggestion that justice is never a single thing, never a definitive destination. There is no sweeping closure here—just the cold, sad beauty of living on, doggedly searching for meaning amid the perpetual churn of history, pain, compromise, and endurance.

Levis has written a novel that refuses easy answers, one that finds its poetry in the messiest entanglements of conscience and consequence. The Meaning of the Murder is both a labyrinth and a map—a vivid, unsettling dispatch from that fraught border between law and love, where being human remains the hardest case of all.

Tony Huang

Tony Huang, PhD, is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Hong Kong Review. He is also the founder of Metacircle Fellowship, Metacircle (Hong Kong) Culture and Education Co., Ltd. and Metaeducation. He works as a guest-editor for SmokeLong Quarterly. His poems and translations have appeared in Mad Swirl, The Hong Kong Review, The Best Small Fictions Anthology Selections 2020, Tianjin Daily, Binhai Times, SmokeLong Quarterly, Nankai Journal, Large Ocean Poetry Quarterly, Yangcheng Evening News and other places.

Copy editor: Nancy He

Intern copy editor: Scarlet Li