“I’d lied to Rachel. I knew what I feared. Knew why I feared it. I closed my eyes and they were there — two lightbulbs hanging in the darkness of the Chicago Subway. Inside their glass skin, a question mark.  Something the old historian himself might struggle to decipher.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (AUG 7, 2011)

Michael Harvey’s sequel to The Third Rail is We All Fall Down, in which PI Michael Kelly wears out a great deal of shoe leather trying to save the citizens of Chicago. An unidentified perpetrator may have released a biological weapon in the city’s subway system. When people begin to sicken and die, a highly trained team of brilliant scientists is called in to identify the substance (is it a strain of anthrax?) and try to find a way to contain it. Kelly is a student of Thucydides, who wrote eloquently about the Plague of Athens in his classic work, “History of the Peloponnesian War.” Kelly wonders whether, twenty-four hundred years later, a modern, man-made plague will decimate Chicago.

Harvey has been praised for his punchy prose style, clipped dialogue (“I don’t know.” “I have to go out.” “I’ll talk to you later.” You get the picture.), and his gritty take on a city that is legendary for its corrupt politicians, ruthless mobsters, gangbangers, and cops on the take. Although Kelly narrates, Harvey occasionally switches to the third person. For example, the author depicts an obnoxious racist named Donnie Quin, who comes from a long line of police officers but does not wear his uniform with pride. Instead, he is an extortionist who forces both legitimate and illegitimate businessmen (better known as drug dealers) to turn over part of their proceeds on a regular basis. He feels no guilt, since everyone knows that Chicago’s City Hall was “a fat, greedy, happy goose, taking in soft money at one end and cranking patronage deals out the other.”

How does Kelly fit in to all this? A sleazy guy from Homeland Security threatens to throw Kelly in jail on trumped-up charges unless the PI agrees to assist Ellen Brazile, “one of the foremost experts in the world on the genetic engineering of bioweapons.” Kelly powwows with Brazile and her team, the Mayor of Chicago, John J. Wilson, and the representative from Homeland Security. They try to come up with a game plan that will minimize loss of life without causing panic.

The prospect of “a molecular arms race,” in which “black biologists” create new strains of bacteria to use against their enemies is genuinely frightening. This novel has some neat bells and whistles–modern tools that can both create and neutralize “the most lethal pathogens known to man” and “smart clothing” made of nanofibers that can stop a bullet and release antiobiotics into the victim’s system. There are the usual violent confrontations, convoluted twists and turns, and a slam-bang ending in which a few loose ends are purposely left dangling. Although certain elements in We All Fall Down are far-fetched and confusing, Harvey manages to hold our interest thanks to his hard-hitting plot, sardonic dialogue, and his tough and savvy hero, Michael Kelly.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (July 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michael Harvey
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Fifth Floor The Third Rail

Bibliography:

• The Chicago Way (August 2007)
• The Fifth Floor (August 2008)
• Third Rail (April 2010)
• We All Fall Down (July 2011)

“The pieces of this case, maybe two or three cases, held together by the thinnest of wires: circumstance and an educated guess. The rest floated and turned in the darkness, offering themselves up as a piece of the puzzle, with no real clue as to how or why.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (APR 22, 2010)

The Windy City is the setting for Michael Harvey’s fast-paced thriller, The Third Rail. Private investigator Michael Kelly is part of a task force that includes a detective named Vince Rodriguez and a no-nonsense FBI agent, Katherine Lawson. Their goal is to find a sadistic sniper who shot several passengers riding Chicago’s public transit system. Someone in the know contacts Kelly, and the conversation leads the ex-cop to believe that the key to this puzzling case may lie in the distant past.

Unwilling to be a helpless pawn in a psychotic individual’s twisted game, Kelly launches his own investigation with the help of Hubert Russell, a “twenty-something cyber hacker.” Kelly also consults a retired policeman named Jimmy Doherty in order to gather information and gain a fresh perspective. Michael scours his memory, as he tries to figure out what happened long ago that could have driven someone to commit such vicious crimes. He soon suspects that the shooter may have an accomplice who is nursing a long-standing grudge.

Not everything in this novel is gloom and doom. Kelly has a soft spot for his year-old spaniel, Maggie, and a high regard for a beautiful judge named Rachel Swenson. Although Rachel is uncomfortable with Michael’s penchant for getting into trouble, she cares enough about him to keep him in her life. However, as events heat up, Rachel may very well run out of patience with her boyfriend’s tendency to track down felons on his own.

Harvey has a spare and straightforward writing style, enhanced by brief, staccato sentences and crisp dialogue. Dramatic descriptive passages add to the tension-filled atmosphere. After the perpetrator picks his first victim, “He pulled the trigger, and the woman dropped straight down. Like a puppet with strings cut, she was all here and there, arms, legs, and a smear of lipstick across her lips and down her chin.” This is not a prettified Chicago. There are rats the size of cats, seamy alleys filled with dumpsters, and “the last remnants of the city’s Cabrini-Green housing complex project” provide a haven for gangs and other miscreants. In the high-rise, which is now little more than a shell, “metal mailboxes scored with bullet holes ran along one wall, and the linoleum floor was covered with broken glass and a handful of syringes.” Even Chicago’s blunt mayor, John J. Wilson, is a profane and arrogant boor who bullies people into doing his bidding.

This gritty police procedural keeps us engrossed until it wanders off track during the overly cluttered conclusion. Harvey throws everything but the kitchen sink into the mix (terrorism, abduction, corruption, violence, cover-ups, you name it), and not all of the myriad twists and turns work well. However, The Third Rail is, for the most part, a suspenseful and entertaining novel that is as unpredictable and rough-edged as the most rundown areas of Chicago’s South Side.

Editor’s note: A portion of this book’s proceeds will be donated to The Cambodian Children’s Fund.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 51 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; 1 edition (April 20, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michael Harvey
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: We All Fall Down The Fifth Floor

Bibliography:

• The Chicago Way (August 2007)
• The Fifth Floor (August 2008)
• Third Rail (April 2010)
• We All Fall Down (July 2011)