Having piloted a grown-up Tiny Tim through Dickensian London in "Mr. Timothy" and enlisted Edgar Allan Poe in the hunt for a killer in upstate New York in "The Pale Blue Eye," Louis Bayard repairs to Paris in THE BLACK TOWER (Morrow, $24.95) for another daring historical adventure - this time in the company of the greatest of French detectives, Eugène François Vidocq. The real-life Vidocq was unmatched as a figure of romantic legend. On the run as a thief, he offered his services to the law, becoming so adept at catching criminals that in 1811 he was named the first chief of the Sûreté, whose detective ranks he filled with former miscreants like himself. A scientific criminologist, he instituted modern procedures in all areas of police work, from ballistics to record-keeping. But it was his swaggering ego and mastery of disguise, as much as his forensic methods, that won him iconic status among authors like Balzac, Hugo, Melville and Poe. Bayard makes brilliant application of Vidocq in this fanciful adventure, which takes place in the unsettled era of Restoration France and rekindles the rumor that Louis-Charles, the 10-year-old son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, did not die in the black tower of his fortress prison in 1795. Who better than Vidocq to navigate these treacherous political shoals, teeming with embittered royalists, seditious republicans and die-hard Bonapartites? Presenting himself in the filthy rags of a beggar (the first of many vivid disguises), the detective orchestrates the hectic action with operatic flamboyance. The narrative chores he leaves to Hector Carpentier, son of the physician, now deceased, who ministered to the dauphin in prison and might have been party to a plot to free the boy. If so, then the artless young man Hector and Vidocq discover in the country town of Saint-Cloud (and must repeatedly rescue from armed assassins) might very well be the true king of France. No snatch-and-run researcher, Bayard takes care to capture Vidocq's roguish voice and grandiose affectations, as well as the melodramatic substance of his published memoirs. While there are glimpses of the elegant Bourbon court, Bayard's primary settings are the foul back alleys of Vidocq's Paris. "I've seen more English tourists in the morgue than in the Louvre," Hector says, putting his finger on the perverse appeal of viewing a beautiful city naked, soaking in the bath of its own bloody history. Marina Marks, the haunted heroine of Debra Ginsberg's clever thriller, THE GRIFT (Shaye Areheart, $23.95), considers herself to be an honest psychic. Unlike those "Gypsies, santeros and voodooiennes" who ply their trade in her South Florida community by sacrificing live chickens and sticking pins into dolls, Marina makes her own shady living by her wits. Applying sharp observation and intuition, she wins the confidence of needy clients like Mrs. Golden, who entrusts her with a valuable ruby ring in the belief that the gift will protect the elderly woman's beloved son from harm. But that ring proves a curse when Marina skips to San Diego and develops a new client base. Ginsberg has a nice way with offbeat characters like Madeline, the pampered wife of a very rich, very angry man; Cooper, whose "boundary issues" hinder his pursuit of a closeted gay psychiatrist; and Eddie, a womanizer who won't take "Get lost, you creep" for an answer. Once Marina's true psychic gifts kick in, making it impossible for her to lie, her clients turn nasty. Given her own storytelling gift, Ginsberg easily counters the suggestion that her plot is schematic. As Marina would testify, "The very concept of randomness was something created to stave off the crush of inevitability." Bill Loehfelm is one of those first-time novelists who don't want to tell a story so much as get it all out of their system. The bottled-up emotions he uncorks in FRESH KILLS (Putnam, $24.95) belong to Junior Sanders, a Staten Island bartender who becomes almost incoherent with rage when he learns that his father has been shot to death, gangland style, outside a deli. That's not grief Junior is choking on, but hatred for the old man, a mean drunk who abused him and his mother and made a nervous wreck of his sister. Junior's attempt to beat the cops to the killer may be a weak plot device, but it's a good excuse to roam this often ignored borough, picking over its garbage and brooding on its wounds. In genre fiction, making your city look bad is a sign of deep affection - which is precisely the message conveyed in new books by two Chicago writers. In Michael Harvey's latest novel, THE FIFTH FLOOR (Knopf, $23.95), Michael Kelly, the cocky P.I. hero of Harvey's nifty retro-noir series, wants to pin a domestic abuse charge on one of the mayor's "fixers," the polite term for a problem solver who "makes things go away." But when Kelly comes across the murdered body of a historian-with an interest in the Great Chicago Fire, he uncovers a conspiracy so deeply entrenched that no fixer can make it go away. Marcus Sakey sees Chicago as a constant source of sin and temptation for weak souls who can't catch a break. In GOOD PEOPLE (Dutton, $24.95), he saddles Tom and Anna Reed with an ethical challenge when they find $375,000 hidden in the apartment of a tenant who died in their building. Once they give in to temptation, these foolish but tenderly drawn innocents find themselves in a classic bind, unable to outrun the criminals, outwit the cops or find their way home again. 'I've seen more English tourists in the morgue than in the Louvre,' Louis Bayard's Parisian narrator says.

*Starred Review* Did the great-great-grandfather of the present mayor of Chicago and the owner-editor of the Chicago Tribune conspire in a land swindle that led to the Great Chicago Fire? That's the nub of this first-rate follow-up to Harvey's much-praised debut novel, The Chicago Way (2007 ). PI Michael Kelly stumbles onto the question while investigating a political fixer for current mayor John J. Wilson, a distinctly Daleyesque, semienlightened despot who rules Chicago with a sometimes heavy hand. The mayor and his bare-knuckles politicos seem abnormally interested in the theory, and their interest compels Kelly to pursue the case, putting him and people he cares about at risk. The Fifth Floor offers a fresh take on the classic American private-eye novel. Reading it feels like putting on a favorite old sweater on a nasty Chicago November day, and it recalls Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald at the top of their form. Harvey makes Chicago and its politics a primary character, and the picture he paints is knowing and shrewd. Hizzoner is a scary wielder of raw political power but also a man determined to make the city a better place to live. Like Chicago itself, The Fifth Floor is edgy but intoxicating, and Harvey seems ready to join Sara Paretsky at the top of the city's crime-fiction A-list.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2008 Booklist

In this follow-up to Harvey's hot debut, The Chicago Way, PI Michael Kelly obliges a past love by trailing her nasty husband--and finds himself involved in a case that leads all the way back to the Great Chicago Fire. With a four-city tour; a 100,000-copy first printing. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

PI Michael Kelly digs into the history of the Great Chicago Fire for his second case in what's shaping up as a strong series (The Chicago Way, 2007). A badly beaten blonde seeking help from old friend Kelly, who "was once something more," lands this new adventure solidly in noir territory. Harvey delivers on the setup with fast repartee, quick scenes and a slate of characters who numb their melancholy with afternoon smokes and booze, but he's after more than pastiche. Rather, he depicts the kind of "justice" meted out in the age of Starbucks coffees and hard-disk drives. Tailing the blonde's two-fisted husband, Kelly learns that he "fixes" problems for a powerful, Daley-like mayor by pressing hard where it hurts. The husband enters an old-money Lincoln Park home and leaves, ashen-faced, moments later; the PI steps inside and finds a dead man dangling from a rope, his mouth stuffed with sand. The victim, Kelly learns, was an armchair historian with an interest in Chicago's disastrous 1871 fire. The buff may have owned a first-edition history of the fire that many, including the mayor, badly want. Investigating that long-ago tragedy, Kelly uncovers some startling clues and leads. The most significant is that Mrs. O'Leary's cow did not start the conflagration. Indeed, the current mayor's great-great-grandfather and a cohort may have set things burning to clear Irish immigrants off land they wanted to develop. The mayor can ill-afford this revelation as he faces a challenge to re-election from a newly arrived black candidate who impresses with fresh ideas (Barack Obama, perhaps?). Kelly, the mayor, the challenger, a slimy curator and others muscle up with the goods they have on each other and start to arm-wrestle. Dry wit, delectable clues and tricky leads hallmark this trenchant tale of the Windy City. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Harvey's superb second thriller to feature PI Michael Kelly (after 2007's The Chicago Way) has the ex-Chicago cop taking on what he thinks is a simple domestic violence case. But when he tails Johnny Woods, a "fixer" for the city's powerful mayor, to what turns out to be a grisly murder scene, Kelly realizes he's stumbled onto a scandal that began with the great Chicago Fire of 1871. Digging deeper, Kelly unearths what was once considered an urban legend: two of Chicago's most eminent families conspiring to eradicate Irish immigrants by burning down the city's slums. As more bodies pile up and he becomes romantically involved with a judge with secrets of her own, Kelly vows to expose the conspiracy, even if that means putting himself on the wrong side of the city's most powerful men. Harvey's plot twists in all the right places, and his noir-inspired dialogue crackles without sounding showy. Marlowe and Spade would readily welcome Michael Kelly into their fold. 4-city author tour. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved