Top-shelf crime novels eventually find their way to the screen, but Michael Harvey’s work has evolved in the other direction. Creator of the acclaimed but regrettably forgotten TV series Cold Case Files, Harvey broke through big-time as a novelist with last summer’s neo-noir classic-to-be The Chicago Way. This year the writer — whose PI, Michael Kelly, is in many ways Chicago’s answer to Marlowe and Spade — brings back his hero in an intricate thriller based partly in the corrupt present and partly in the corrupt past, where he might finally find out what caused 1871’s Great Chicago Fire (it wasn’t a cow).
The Fifth Floor
Michael Harvey
Knopf
Out Aug. 27
$23.95
