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.

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

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.