We all fall down : Michael Kelly mysteries #4 / Michael Harvey.

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Title:

We all fall down : Michael Kelly mysteries #4 / Michael Harvey.

Author:

Harvey, Michael T.

ISBN:

9780307272515

Edition:

1st ed.

Publication Information:

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.

Physical Description:

297 p. ; 25 cm.

Series:

Michael Kelly Mysteries #4

Abstract:

When Chicago is targeted by a brutal biological attack that threatens millions of lives, Michael Kelly begins a desperate search through the tangled underworld of the city's West Side gangs, where he confronts the covert practices of dark science in one of the nation's premiere laboratories.

Subject Term:

Bioterrorism -- Fiction.

Terrorism -- Prevention -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

Chicago (Ill.) -- Fiction.

Genre:

Suspense fiction.

Detective and mystery stories.

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Avon-Washington Township Public Library	Adult Mystery Fiction Book Hardback	120791002098160	M HAR	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Chicago cop turned private investigator Michael Kelly is racing to save his city from a deadly new foe: a biological weapon unleashed underground.

When a lightbulb falls in a subway tunnel, it releases a pathogen that could kill millions. While the mayor postures, people begin to die, especially on the city's grim West Side. Hospitals become morgues. L trains are converted into rolling hearses. Finally, the government acts, sealing off entire sections of the city--but are they keeping people out or in? Meanwhile, Michael Kelly's hunt for the people who poisoned his city takes him into the tangled underworld of Chicago's West Side gangs and the even more frightening world of black biology--an elite discipline emerging from the nation's premier labs, where scientists play God and will stop at nothing to preserve their secrecy.

It's a brave new world . . . and the most audacious page-turner yet from an emerging modern master.

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Harvey shows how a thriller focused on bioterrorism should be done in his outstanding fourth novel featuring Chicago PI Michael Kelly (after The Third Rail). At a high-level meeting that includes the city's mayor and Homeland Security agents, two scientists reveal that a biowarning device in a subway tunnel has detected the possible presence of a pathogen. Kelly provides security for the biologists when they visit the site of what everyone hopes is a false positive. Skeptical of the explanation for why the Feds or Chicago PD aren't being used for the job, Kelly soon learns that some form of superbug is felling Chicagoans left and right. As the city is quarantined, Kelly risks his life to track down the truth, a search that brings him into conflict with the Mafia and a ruthless narcotics gang. The complexity of the plot never overwhelms the narrative flow in this utterly persuasive view of a present-day apocalyptic nightmare. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Chicago PI Michael Kelly is both maverick and insider, a free-swinger who has worked with and against the city's powerbrokers. In his latest case, those unlikely credentials make him the perfect man for a job no sane person would want: providing security for scientists charged with containing the release of a biological weapon in the city's subway system. As the body count grows, and Chicago's West Side becomes a fenced-in death camp, Kelly moves between the mayor and his minions, Homeland Security thugs, various gang leaders, and top Mob henchmen, trying to nail who's responsible for the attack. Through three novels (most recently, The Third Rail, 2010), Harvey has displayed a remarkable grasp of Chicago's underpinnings, at street level and in greed-stained government offices. Here, though, it's anything but business as usual. With the otherworldly horror of black biology casting a lethal blanket over the city, Kelly must play off one self-interested antagonist against another to neutralize an invisible threat. A gripping crime novel with a frightening message about very plausible biological warfare.--Ott, Bil. Copyright 2010 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

Those blood-lusty Jacobean dramatists could have picked up a few pointers about betrayal and revenge from Reginald Hill, who turns a contemporary crime of greed into a timeless morality tale in THE WOODCUTTER (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99). For all its elaborate narrative artifices, there's a fairy-tale simplicity to this story of a Cumbrian woodcutter's son who accomplishes three difficult tasks ("Get elocution lessons, get educated, get rich") and is granted his "heart's desire" - the hand of the "beautiful princess glimpsed dancing on the castle lawn." Having achieved his youthful goals, along with such additional perks as a knighthood for his services as head of a multimillion-dollar commercial empire, Sir Wilfred Hadda ("Wolf," to those who knew him as a wild boy) is sitting pretty until he's dragged from his Holland Park mansion and charged with both trafficking in child pornography and committing financial fraud. Wolf is seriously injured while resisting arrest amid the onslaught of a media mob, and by the time he comes out of a coma (minus an eye, a few fingers and the use of a leg), his business is lost and so are his wife and daughter, his old friends and close associates, and his good name. "I was the perfect hate figure," he reflects. "A call from me clearly sounded like the tinkle of a leper's bell." Hill's storytelling is its own delight, a fun house of shifting timelines and multiple perspectives that mirror (and distort) the dodgy nature of Wolf's past and the ambiguity of his future. If there's a bedrock reality here, it's the bond between this dangerously charismatic antihero and Alva Ozigbo (called "Elf"), a young psychiatrist who treats him toward the end of his long incarceration. Although she believes this "shambling, stooped, scarred and limping figure" to be rehabilitated and engineers his release to a hermit's life back in Cumbria, Elf never thought Wolf innocent, and she fears the worst when his faithless friends and avowed enemies begin to die in peculiarly cruel ways. "Anything they get will be less than they deserve," Wolf maintains, sounding the book's disturbing theme of blood vengeance and retribution. Elf is properly horrified. But then, she's a far less commanding character than Wolf - or, for that matter, all the morally feral creatures who sport with him in these dark woods. The self-reflective process of literary criticism known as "deconstructing the text" becomes a diabolical game of murder in DOMINANCE (Simon & Schuster, $25), an academic mystery by Will Lavender that gleefully illustrates the dangers of losing yourself in a book. As taught on a college campus in Vermont at a night class conducted via satellite from the prison cell of a convicted murderer, "LIT 424: Unraveling a Literary Mystery" purports to find a way to identify the reclusive author of two cult novels. But the class's singular method of scholarship, called "the Procedure," which encourages the searchers to find a hole in the text and slip inside the narrative, demands a level of role-playing that puts the students in peril - even 15 years later, when one of their elite group is murdered. So far, so much fun. But as the violence escalates, the plot demands more of these paper-thin characters than they can muster, while exposing the mysterious author's prose to more scrutiny than this drivel can bear. Lavender has the devious skills to write a twisted puzzle mystery, but he lacks the literary chops to play in J. D. Salinger's band. Michael Harvey's Chicago crime novels nail that city right between the eyes. Like previous books in his virile series featuring Michael Kelly, a savvy private detective who understands exactly how this town's politics work, WE ALL FALL DOWN (Knopf, $24.95) gets the connections between a corrupt cop who conducts his sideline drug trade through the owner of a Korean grocery store and the 13-year-old gang member who shoots the grocer in the face to take over his business. Harvey also knows how these violent transactions reverberate down at City Hall, and if he wanted to confine the action to the street his novels would lose none of their drama. But this new book is something of a sequel to "The Third Rail," so it has a bioterrorism angle that expands the street action into a truly terrifying apocalyptic nightmare. Gimmicks are nothing new in detective stories. The earliest amateur sleuths were either eccentrics or criminals, and the first wave of private eyes in American pulp fiction distinguished themselves through such personal quirks as an aptitude for bowling. Still, you have to hand it to Judy Clemens for providing her amateur sleuth with a genuinely offbeat gimmick: she travels With Death. FLOWERS FOR HER GRAVE (Poisoned Pen, $24.95) catches Clemens in the amateurish effort of explaining in detail how Casey Maldonado comes to be running from the law in the company of a specter who is addicted to reality TV shows and loves to dress up in outlandish costumes. Once past the blocks of exposition, with Casey installed as a fitness instructor in a gated Florida community where a murder takes place, we're free to appreciate her companion's wit and dress code: skintight Spandex for a Zumba class; a flowered bathing suit and shades for the pool; and an all-white ensemble with brass-handled walking stick to make a fashion statement ("I am the epitome of cool"). Not even Cosmo Topper, who was advised by two charming ghosts, can beat that one. 'I was the perfect hate figure,' confesses the ambiguous protagonist of Reginald Hill's latest crime novel.

Excerpts

CHAPTER 1 My eyes flicked open. The clock read 4:51 a.m., and I was wide awake. I'd been dreaming---rich colors, shapes, and places---but couldn't remember all the details. It didn't matter. I climbed out of bed and shuffled down the hallway. Rachel Swenson sat in an armchair by the front windows. The pup was asleep in her lap. "Hey," I said. She turned, face paled in light from the street, eyes a glittering reflection of my grief and guilt. "Hey." "That dog can sleep anywhere." I pulled a chair close. Maggie slipped an eye open, yawned, stretched, and went back to sleep. "I should be staying at my place," Rachel said. "I like you here." She tickled two bandaged fingers across the top of the pup's head and ran her eyes back toward the windows. Rachel was a sitting judge for the Northern District of Illinois. And one of the finest people I knew. She was also damaged. Because she was my girlfriend. Or, rather, had been. "I was going to make a cup of tea," I said. "You want one?" She shook her head. I stayed where I was. And we sat together in the darkness. "You can't sleep?" she said. "Dreams." She nodded, and we sat some more. "What's the knife for, Rach?" She looked down at the knife tucked into her left hand. "I got it from the kitchen." "Why?" Her gaze drifted to a small table and the slab of cheese that sat on it. "You want a piece?" I shook my head. She held the blade up between us. "You thought I was going to hurt someone?" "Just wondering about the knife, Rach." "I'm fine." It had been almost a month since the attack. Most of the swelling in her face was gone---the bruises reduced to faint traces of yellow. "What did you dream about?" she said. "I usually don't remember." "Usually?" "Sometimes I get premonitions. Twice before. I wake up and feel certain things have happened." "If they've already happened, they're not premonitions." "You're right." "Are you going to make your tea?" "In a minute." "Tell me about them," she said, cutting off a small slice of cheese and nibbling at a corner. "The dreams?" "The premonitions." "I got the first one when my brother died." "Philip?" "I was seventeen. Woke up in the middle of the night and walked out to our living room." "And?" "I sat in front of the phone and stared at it for ten minutes until it rang. The warden told me he'd killed himself. Hung himself in a cell with his bedsheet. But it wasn't anything I didn't already know." "I'm sorry." "Second time was a couple years back---the night my father died." I remembered my eyes opening, tasting the old man's passing like dry dust at the back of my throat. I pulled out the whiskey that night and filled a glass. Then I sat by the phone again until it rang. "And now?" Rachel said. "That's the thing. I'm not sure this time." "But it's something." "I believe so, yes." She got up from the chair and settled the pup on the couch. "I'll make the tea." I listened to her rattle the tap in the kitchen, then set the kettle. I got up and pulled a book off the shelf, Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War. It took me a moment to find the passage. Book 2, chapter 7. The historian's description of the Plague of Athens. All speculation as to its origin and its causes . . . I leave to other writers, whether lay or professional; for myself, I shall simply set down its nature, and explain the symptoms by which perhaps it may be recognized by the student, if it should ever break out again. This I can the better do, as I had the disease myself, and watched its operation in the case of others. I thought about Thucydides, surrounded by death, touched himself, scribbling down its essence for us to read twenty--four hundred years later. 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. The kettle began to whistle. On cue, the phone rang. Rachel watched from the doorway as I picked up. It wasn't a voice I expected to hear. And that was exactly what I expected. I listened without saying more than a word or two. Finally, the voice stopped talking---waiting, apparently, for a reaction. "Where are you?" I said. The voice told me. "I'll be there in an hour." I hung up. Rachel looked like she might speak, then turned away. Maggie was awake now and staring at me from the couch. "You want breakfast?" The pup's ears perked up at the last word. I walked toward the kitchen. She beat me there by the length of the living room. "Was it what you thought?" Rachel handed me a mug of tea. "I don't know." I fed the dog. We both listened to her crunch away and then lick the bowl clean. "I have to go out," I said. "I can't be here when you get back." "Rach . . ." "Stop." She raised her arm and touched her hand to her face, as if I were about to hit her. Then she turned and left. The pup followed. I walked back into the bedroom and got dressed. When I returned to the living room, Rachel was curled up on the couch. "I'll talk to you later," I said. She didn't respond. I was going to say more, but recalled the lessons of saying too much. So I left. It was still dark out as I tramped down Addison. The first streaks of morning stained the Chicago night---fresh paint on an old canvas. Underneath, a city slept. Everywhere, it seemed, except in my dreams. And the dreams of those I cared about. Excerpted from We All Fall Down by Michael Harvey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.