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Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Harvey, M. | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic (m) Harvey, M. 2007 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
From the co-creator and executive producer of the television show Cold Case Files, a fast-paced, stylish murder mystery featuring a tough-talking Irish cop turned private investigator who does for the city of Chicago what Elmore Leonard did for Detroit and Raymond Chandler did for Los Angeles. Chicago private investigator Michael Kelly is hired by his former partner, John Gibbons, to help solve an eight-year-old rape and battery case, a case it turns out his old friend was once ordered to forget. When Gibbons turns up dead on Navy Pier, Kelly enlists a team of his savviest colleagues to connect the dots between the recent murder and the cold case it revived: Diane Lindsay, a television reporter whose relationship with Kelly is not strictly professional; his best friend from childhood, Nicole Andrews, a forensic DNA expert; Nicole¿s boyfriend, Vince Rodriguez, a detective with a special interest in rape cases; and Bennett Davis from the DA¿s office, a friend since Kelly¿s days on the force. To close the case, Kelly will have to face the mob, a serial killer, his own double-crossing friends, and the mean streets of the city he loves. Ferociously plotted and crackling with wit, The Chicago Way is first-rate suspense steeped in the glorious, gritty atmosphere of a great city: a marvelous debut.
Author Notes
Michael Harvey is a writer, journalist, and documentary producer. He is the co-creator, writer and executive producer of the Prime Time Emmy-nominated television series Cold Case Files¿ and a former investigative producer for CBS in Chicago.
Harvey's work has won numerous national and international awards, including multiple Emmys and an Academy Award nomination for the Holocaust documentary Eyewitness.
Michael's novels include The Innocence Game, We All Fall Down, The Third Rail, The Fifth Floor, The Chicago Way, and The Governor's Wife.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Harvey's debut delivers a fast-paced thrill ride through Chicago's seedy underbelly, where the lines between cops and criminals become dangerously blurred. When his old partner asks for help with an old rape case, Michael Kelly, former Chicago detective turned PI, finds himself in the middle of a massive coverup with links to a notorious serial killer on death row. With the help of his childhood friend, DNA analyst Nicole Andrews, feisty and sexy TV reporter Diane Lindsay and a handful of cops he hopes he can trust, Kelly must solve the original rape case while staying alive as the men who killed to keep a secret set their sights on him. Harvey, the cocreator and executive producer of A&E's Cold Case Files, spins a twisted story that masterfully combines the sardonic wit of Chandler with the gritty violence of Lehane's Kenzie and Gennaro series. Bringing Chicago to life so skillfully that the reader can almost hear the El train in the distance, Harvey is poised to take the crime-writing world by storm. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Nine years after the Chicago Police Department let a rapist slip between their fingers, people involved in the case are dying by the dozen in this heartfelt, ambitious, highly derivative debut. The first victim--at least the first one private eye Michael Kelly finds out about--is John Gibbons, his old partner on the Chicago force, shot to death the day after he asks Kelly's help in the case of Elaine Remington, who's just reappeared after miraculously surviving a murderous assault in 1997. After the cops arrested a suspect that night, he mysteriously disappeared from the precinct house and the case was discreetly buried. Now a remarkably similar rapist seems to be at work again, leaving behind a trail of cut throats and bullet wounds. It's all "just like in the movies," muses Kelly, and he couldn't be more right. Not only is his author boldly stealing dialogue tags from The Big Sleep, The Godfather and The Silence of the Lambs, Kelly himself, a wisecracking Irish scrapper who slings metaphors like Philip Marlowe and reads Homer and Aeschylus in Greek, is right out of Central Casting. But when Kelly's oldest friend is murdered--bad for her, good for the story--and the DNA evidence implicates a convict who's spent the last ten years on Death Row, Kelly shakes off the shades of those genre classics and gets down to business. If you can shrug off the mannered narration, ex-TV producer Harvey ends up delivering the goods. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The opening pages are packed with the kind of wry, dry narration that goes down as smoothly as a pulp paperback with a shot of rye. But the case that walks in through Chicago PI Michael Kelly's door is no laughing matter: find a brutal rapist who walked out of jail nine years ago. Harvey is a cocreator of A&E's Cold Case Files, and his plot reflects a true-crime sensibility. As Kelly's investigation uncovers a growing body count, DNA evidence, antirape activists, and a John Wayne Gacy-like serial killer all come into play. But as much as we enjoy a mix of vintage prose and contemporary settings, wisecracking banter is the wrong tone for a topic like rape. The prose sobers up somewhat as the tale goes on, but Harvey never gets the blend quite right. It's a twisty page-turner (and Chicagoans will enjoy seeing the Lincoln Park and Wrigleyville neighborhoods cast as mean streets), but if Harvey had chosen either a lighter plot or darker prose, the book could have been much better.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
DONNA LEON has staked out Venice, Magdalen Nabb knows every narrow street in Florence, and Andrea Camilleri holds Sicily in the palm of his hand. But only Michael Dibdin, in the clever and exuberantly witty police procedurals he created for a dyspeptic cop named Aurelio Zen, tried to wrap his arms around the whole of Italy. Braving his way province by province - from the mountains of Alto Adige (in "Medusa") to the caves of Sardinia (in "Vendetta") - the British-born author produced crime stories that capture the idiosyncratic essence of each region while contributing to a dynamic study of the Italian national character in all its unruly glory. When he died last spring, Dibdin was well along in this ambitious deconstruction process, with END GAMES (Pantheon, $23.95), the last Zen novel, providing a key piece in the jigsaw design of the series. The story is set in the remote and rugged hill towns of Calabria, a southern region known to the French as "la Calabre sauvage" and one that Zen views with wary amusement - partly because he's filling in for a provincial chief of police who has shot himself in the foot while cleaning his pistol. But when an American lawyer working for a shady Hollywood film company is kidnapped and then killed, and when it later comes to light that the victim was actually a Calabrian, born into the oldest and richest family in the area, Zen begins to get a sense of a more cunning criminal mentality at work behind the transparently thuggish manner of the locals. Dibdin is outrageously funny, as always, in conveying Zen's snobby Venetian attitude toward his regional postings. Here, he heaps scorn on the tomato-based cuisine ("roba del sud," his mother would have dismissed it - "southern stuff"), the unrefined architecture (the offensive town church is declared "a modern monstrosity with Romanesque pretensions") and the rude local dialect ("incomprehensible" even to native Italians). More pointedly, Zen is "sick to death of this romantic mystique of the south" and "fed up with hearing how crime down here is ineradicable because it feeds off an unfathomable collective tradition of blood, honor and tragedy." Even as he allows Zen to rail against the xenophobic customs of this cruel and dangerous place, Dibdin registers respect for the games of survival adopted by the fatalistic populace as a way of life. And while satire invariably triumphs over sentiment when his colorful Calabrian lowlifes are joined in their criminal games by the ruthless Americans from the film company, Dibdin also gives his detective Zen-like moments of enlightenment into the soul of the region. "It depresses me," he tells a friend, responding to "the sense of a generalized and ineradicable sadness about the place." But in the end, he makes peace with this foreign land before he leaves for home. Michael Harvey, one of the originators and currently an executive producer of the addictive TV-documentary crime show "Cold case Files," applies his inside expertise shrewdly in his first novel, THE CHICAGO WAY (Knopf, $23.95). Working from a tight plot about an old rape case that heats up after the detective who tries to reopen it is murdered, Harvey writes his best when he gets up close to a subject, as he does in a shocker of a scene in a police warehouse stuffed with boxes of evidence from unsolved rape cases. The efficiency of his cinematic style also suits the brisk, animated shots of Chicago that give the story both grit and authenticity. But Harvey has only mixed success in adapting his up-to-date material to the vintage noir style he aims to emulate. His sleuth, a young private eye named Michael Kelly, initially has trouble finding his narrative groove and sounds a bit like Dick Powell doing a voice-over. He loosens up once the investigation into the cover-up of a serial rapist begins to get interesting; all the same, certain procedural devices just don't wash. In classic P.I. novels, the hero tricks the cops and leans on a reporter pal to pick up information. Here, the ex-cop Kelly is so friendly with the fuzz they issue him invitations to crime scenes and autopsies and work up DNA evidence for him in the forensic lab. Nice try, but I don't think so. Joe Sandilands, the Scotland Yard detective who served so honorably in Barbara Cleverly's historical mysteries set in India, reveals another aspect of his sensitive nature in TUG OF WAR (Carroll & Graf, $24.95). The year is 1926, and Sandilands has been dispatched to Reims, France, to determine the identity of a mute, shell-shocked World War I veteran whose sad condition (and sizable military pension) has attracted multiple claims. Listening to the heartbreaking war stories of the major applicants, including the widow of a Champagne vintner who disappeared on the battlefield of Chemin des Dames "in the middle of the corpse-strewn Marne," is enough to rattle the detective, who fought at Passchendaele. But despite her mastery at vivid scene-setting, Cleverly never loses sight of the historical puzzle that is central to her story. Simply put, it's a stunner. There's usually an element of the supernatural - or at least, the macabre - in Fred Vargas's insanely imaginative procedurals featuring Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. Although Adamsberg is commissaire of the prestigious Serious Crime Squad in Paris, his messy personal life has a way of taking over his criminal investigations. This is precisely what happens in WASH THIS BLOOD CLEAN FROM MY HAND (Penguin, paper, $14) when an eventful trip to Canada leads him to be hunted for murder on two continents. But one doesn't read for logic in this novel (which maintains its loopy quality in Sian Reynolds's translation from the French); one reads to be amazed by the fantastic twists in the bizarre plot about a long-dead serial killer who seems to be pursuing his quarry from the grave. One reads as well to be delighted by the literary grace notes. Even when the formal symbolism gets a bit thick, who can resist a detective who cracks a case by researching the etymology of a killer's name? Michael Dibdin Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen novels capture regional Italy - and the gloriously unruly national character.
Library Journal Review
The latest incarnation of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe is ex-Chicago cop Michael Kelly, who narrates his tale in crisp staccato prose. Kelly is drawn into an eight-year-old rape case after his former partner is found dead on Navy Pier. The rape victim becomes Kelly's latest client, a woman whose story intrigues a DNA analyst and a TV anchorwoman. Kelly's investigation soon takes him into deep, dangerous waters, with connections to the mob, a cover-up, and a serial killer. Debut author Harvey borrows elements from Chandler and Robert B. Parker's Spenser to create an appealing, crusading sleuth. Despite a certain lack of originality in the serial killer, who resembles notorious murderer John Wayne Gacy, this is recommended for all public libraries. Harvey is the cocreator of television's Cold Case Files, and that may add patron appeal.-Lesa M. Holstine, Glendale P.L., AZ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.