Future looks bright for ‘Third Rail’ crime fiction author

If you like anything about Chicago, then you’ll enjoy Michael Harvey’s latest entry into crime fiction, “The Third Rail.”

Harvey is a relative newcomer to the genre, as he has written only two books before his current entry — “The Fifth Floor” (2008) and “The Chicago Way” (2007). He is best known for his work as a journalist and documentary producer, earning an Academy Award nomination for the Holocaust documentary "Eyewitness."

His future looks bright as a novelist, though, as his first two books earned critical acclaim from authors, including Erik Larson, who wrote a best-selling novel about the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, “The Devil in the White City.”

Harvey’s “The Third Rail” is a superb, straightforward crime story that involves domestic terrorism, big-city politics, a nosy journalist and a tragic episode in the city’s past.

Michael Kelly is a young, successful private investigator who used to work the Windy City streets as a cop and detective. One day, in the middle of winter, a sniper starts shooting and killing passengers on an elevated train through the Loop. This throws the city into a panic, and Kelly is brought into the case, first by the killers themselves then by the Chicago PD and the FBI.

Then there are more deaths when a sniper strikes vehicles along a freeway during the morning commute, and more fear grips the city. Authorities soon discover that more mayhem may be coming.

But who is causing it? Certainly not just a lone gunman, as Kelly uncovers some facts about a retired cop, the Catholic Church and a
train company with a murky past. Not all leads pan out but Kelly quickly realizes that the current violence has ties to a fatal 1980 elevated train crash that killed more than 10 people (the real crash happened in 1977, as Harvey notes later). Kelly knows this because he himself was involved in the wreck as a boy.

To make matters worse, Kelly’s girlfriend, Rachel Swenson, is kidnapped and held for ransom. This enrages Kelly, who now has to make some difficult decisions.

"Someone is going to die," fumes Kelly, who "took a minute to distill the violence into a more refined form and tucked it away" until it was needed later.
 
“The Third Rail” is tightly written, entertaining and moves along at a rapid pace, perhaps too quickly. It lacks some heft that other modern crime novelists, including George Pelecanos, Ace Atkins and Michael Connelly, manage to accomplish.

Some of the secondary characters could've been better developed, and I found it difficult to either like or dislike Kelly. Maybe that's the way Harvey intended. Nonetheless, "The Third Rail" makes for some riveting reading.