The Chicago Way

Starred review from June 25, 2007
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.

September 24, 2007
Writer and TV producer Harvey's debut novel, in which Chicago PI Michael Kelley seeks the solution to an eight-year-old rape and battery case, is so old-school hard-boiled it should have “caper” in the title. The first-person narrative comes complete with such standard ingredients as a murdered former partner, several sultry babes, mobsters, tough cops and characters from high society as well as low. The last thing this moderately engrossing example of Raymond Chandler lite needs is a reader determined to call attention to its weaknesses. Unfortunately, Stephen Hoye's idea of noir coolspeak is an exaggerated emphasis on certain key words in a sentence (“Three questions buzzed
through the early morning fog
I call my brain
....”). The result is an annoying singsong that pushes the tough prose into parody and, in the case of Hoye's absurdly breathy, insinuating female voices, beyond. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, June 25).

Harvey's knock-out whodunit introduces Michael Kelly, a hard-boiled Chicago PI. This first novel by the co-creator of the TV hit "Cold Case Files" features the investigation of a cold rape case involving high-level cover-ups, the Mob, a serial killer, the recent murder of Kelly's ex-partner, and crime on the mean streets of Chicago. Narrator Stephen Hoye plays the PI with mounting tension and admirable restraint, keeping the pace appropriately slow, but chilling and mesmerizing. Hoye is exceptional as Kelly's female friends--throaty, sexy, as determined as any man, but totally feminine. He excels at bringing the rumble of the El, the smell of beer in the Irish bars, and the sinister alleys of the gritty Midwestern city to the mind's ear. M.T.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine