The Fifth Floor

The Fifth Floor

Michael Harvey’s sizzling follow-up to <i>The Chicago Way</i> (“A wonderful first novel . . . Harvey has studied the masters and put his own unique touch on the crime novel . . . Heralds the arrival of a major new voice” —Michael Connelly) opens with a murder in contemporary Chicago and winds its way back to Mrs. O’Leary’s cow and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.<br><br>Private investigator Michael Kelly, the Windy City’s answer to Philip Marlowe, is back in another page-turner that revives a tantalizing mystery buried in Chicago’s past. When Kelly is hired by an old girlfriend to tail her abusive husband, he expects trouble of a domestic rather than a historical nature. Life, however, is not so simple. The trail leads Kelly to an old house on Chicago’s North Side. Inside it, he finds a body, and perhaps the answer to one of Chicago’s most enduring mysteries: who started the Great Chicago Fire and why. The ensuing investigation takes Kelly to places he’d rather not go: specifically, City Hall’s fabled fifth floor, where the mayor is feeling the heat. Kelly becomes embroiled in a scam that stretches from current politics back to the night<b> </b>Chicago burned to the ground, and along the way, he finds himself framed for murder, before finally facing a killer bent on rewriting history.<i><br><br>The Fifth Floor</i> is fast-stepping, intricately woven suspense, rich with the lore and atmosphere of a great city. A marvelous successor to Harvey’s critically acclaimed debut.