The Third Rail (Michael Kelly Series)

Each of the first three novels by Michael Harvey is superb crime-fiction. Michael Kelly, the protagonist ex-cop hero, is true to form and in step with the likes of Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe. Kelly deals with all types of villians - from the easy to spot to the well-hidden higher-ups. Harvey writes like a newspaper man - short sentences that pack a lot of punch.

A wave of panic envelops the Windy City after a bloodthirsty killer and trained Army sniper called Robles shoots and kills a woman on a train platform and then later executes another lady as she rides a silver L train. Private eye and former Chicago police officer Michael Kelly is drawn into the case when he chases the killer right after the murder on the platform. While in pursuit of the shooter, Kelly is ambushed in a deserted alleyway. A man in a ski mask puts a gun to Kelly's head, and the PI is certain he will be killed. But instead, the masked man whispers to him, knocks him out cold, and leaves him for the authorities to find. After Kelly recovers, he is convinced that the culprit has an accomplice, but the FBI dismisses the claim and has their own ideas about how the ambush went down. Hours after the earlier attacks, a holy water font at Holy Name cathedral is spiked with a deadly chemical substance. With the FBI leading the high-profile case, Kelly is asked to assist. He enlists the expertise of Hubert Russell, a twenty-something cyber hacker who had helped Kelly solve a murder while the young man worked at the Cook County Bureau of Land Records. While Chicago PD Detective Vince Rodriguez watches Kelly's back, and with FBI agent Katherine Lawson not far behind, the killer taunts Kelly and even sends him clues. As the tension mounts, Kelly starts to connect the dots. While the FBI plays the case by the book, Mayor John J. Wilson wants the matter dispatched quickly and the killer taken care of --- no questions asked. With grit and grim determination, Kelly sets out to solve the case and begins to see a connection between the current situation and a historic catastrophe that has haunted him since he was a child. In THE THIRD RAIL, Michael Harvey has created another first-rate thriller set in the Windy City. Fast-paced action, dialogue that crackles, realistic characters, a killer on the loose, no-holds-barred Chicago politics, a scandal within the Chicago Archdiocese, a historic catastrophe, and a Pentagon cover-up with potentially dangerous consequences contribute to an exciting, suspenseful novel, with a promise of more thrills to come.

In Chicago, at the Southport L Station, Robles sees the woman alone by the stairs and fires a shot into her temple. Soon afterward he slices the throat of building manager Halter who welcomed him as a new tenant as Robles prepared for his next shoot. From the room's window he fires at a passing train exploding a passenger's head. Soon following that spree, the sniper kills three commuters on Lake Shore Drive, but failed to assassinate former cop turned private investigator Michael Kelly's girlfriend Judge Rachel Swenson. CPD and FBI work the case, but Chicago mayor John J. Wilson hires Kelly off the books as the sleuth is actively involved as the killer taunts him via cell phone. Soon the sleuth believes there are two culprits working in harmonious synchronization while also wondering if somehow the murder spree is not quite as random as assumed; perhaps even going back three decades to when as a tweener Kelly survived an elevated train tragedy. The third Kelly Windy City Noir (see The Chicago Way and The Fifth Floor) is a superb thriller that grips the audience with the first shot fired and never slows down until the final confrontation. The story line effortlessly switches from Kelly's first person viewpoint starting with a gun butt to his head and a profound third person look into the heads of deadly duet. The Third Rail is a fabulous Chicago cat and mouse investigative tale that never wastes a twitter of a moment even with a great twist that turns Kelly into a city hero though he never fires the key shot. Harriet Klausner

It is no accident that Michael Harvey walks with Raymond Chandler into the "Third Rail" of high voltage political suicide topics - in the form ot a literary detective novel. In Chandler's case, he actualy was either on the inside, or close enough to it, to smoke out the story, and then put it to paper in a fictionalized novel that readers could not only be entertained, but educated, as to the ways of the political corruption machine in the circles of big business/politics; where murder, bribery, extortion, torture, and the like, were simply a method of "doing business". I had the pleasure of reading The Chicago Way when it came out around August 2007 with an up-to-date Phillip Marlowe, in the character of PI Michael Kelly. Now on his third adventure, the reader is taken for a ride into the new guilded age of corruption, that is beginning to make the first one look like an innocent Mickey Mouse w/no golden patented handcuffs. Kelly is off and running literally on the first few pages and finds himself looking into the barrel of a gun. It is certain death, and then the pace and stakes just keep getting higher. And just when you think/That's a wrap King/along comes another wicked twist. His writing and style are are neck & neck with Chandler's. His characterizations/On the other side was an old face, hammered down between two shoulders and pinched with anger at a life that had somehow wound up here/speak for themselves. Or, as an assasin is picking & analyzing his victims he sarcastically thinks/For any of the three, a pull of the trigger might even be a blessing. God bless America/ unfortunately, the villian's take is not far off the mark and another of "The Third Rail" topics. Or, when a FBI agent intuits/Reality is realitive, meaning it happened whatever way the Bureau says it happened(google Jim Fetzer blogspot & numerous programs on JFK assasination). Or, when the novel refers to Terror 2000/Issued in 1998, the Pentagon's classified report outlined potential terrorist threats ...the subway scenario involving weaponized anthrax(google Guns and Butter Anthrax March 24, 2010). Or, in working with the press/She'll be our mouthpiece. We get the story out the way we want, when we want. Or, when Homeland Security steps in/We operate under a federal directive called Cyber Intiation. Allows us, amomg other things, to monitor computers and Internet activity which might pose a threat to national security(discovering the truth behind the government's crime syndicate PR curtain). Or, how the financial crisis effects city budgets(google Andrew Gavin Marshall: The Global Economic Crisis). Sufice to say there are some delicious secrets of collusion/corruption that these characters share in their respective beds of greed & desire. Beds that protect the secrets of the sacred high voltage/Third Rail of politics/power. Take a high voltage read that is shockingly High-Fun entertainment/education. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED !!!!!!!