The Third Rail (Michael Kelly #3) by Michael Harvey


A Solid Crime Story

Originally Published in 2010.

The Third Rail is the third book in a series about Michael Kelly, a hard-boiled former cop turned private detective. Lots of action and lots of tension build throughout the book as Kelly investigates a series of seemingly random attacks on Chicago's famed Elevated Train system.

For me, this was a welcome change of pace from the seemingly endless books about crime in NYC and LA, cities that I know only from television. I am a Midwesterner and I am familiar with the Windy City so I had no problems envisioning the neighborhoods and the city skyline.

That being said, the plot was not terribly original (the TV show Castle ran a similar premise as an episode while I was reading this book) and the old saw with the Catholic Church being corrupt and more worried about PR than anything else has been played too often as of late.
Photo by Kelly Martin


 Chapter 26 features an especially clever point of view on victims of a shooting on Lake Shore Drive - it's rare when someone has a new way of looking at things in an overcrowded genre such as the crime novel.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: The Third Rail by Michael Harvey. 

 Reviewed on April 21, 2010.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

SEPARATION of CHURCH and HATE: A SANE PERSON'S GUIDE to TAKING BACK the BIBLE from FUNDAMENTALISTS, FASCISTS, and FLOCK-FLEECING FRAUDS (audiobook) by John Fugelsang

Image
Published in August of 2025 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, John Fugelsang. Duration: 9 hours, 24 minutes. Unabridged. John Fugelsang is seemingly omnipresent on the cable TV news/political talk show circuit. He is a talented debater because he knows how to bring the goods to an argument, especially when Christian Nationalism is involved. Fugelsang had a unique upbringing in a super-Catholic household. Why was it unusual? His mother was a former nun and his father was a former Franciscan friar. They fell in love, had a bunch of kids, and made sure that they all went to church whenever it was having a service.  In a a lot of ways, this felt a lot like my childhood. No - my parents weren't nuns or priests. But, I grew up in rural setting where my Lutheran church was one of the centers of my life. Church every weekend, most of the holiday services, Sunday school, Christmas programs, church youth group, vacation bible school, and I worked at a church summer camp for fi...
Read more

THIS BOOK WON'T BURN (audiobook) by Samira Ahmed

Image
Published by Little, Brown Young Readers in 2024. Read by Kauser Mohammed. Duration: 10 hours, 34 minutes. Unabridged. Book summary Noor Khan is a senior in high school and she is devastated. Her father walked out on her family and moved back to his native England. He gave no warning and the family is reeling. Noor's mother decides that a change of location would be best. Noor, her little sister (a freshman), and her mom move from their diverse upper middle class Chicago neighborhood to a downstate Illinois small town so that her mom can work at a small college.  Noor hates it. She misses her friends and the vibrancy of Chicago. She also feels like an oddity because she is Indian and Muslim in a school that is very white and very Christian.  She determines to gut out this one last semester of high school and then head back to Chicago to go to college. She decides she doesn't need friends or even to enjoy this small town - she just needs to get in, get the diploma and then get ...
Read more

The Best of 2025.

Image
This is a "best of" list based on the 84 books I read and reviewed in 2025. I do not focus on new books, so there are books on this "best of" ranging from being published in 1973 to being published in 2025. The titles are active links to my reviews. *** = Best of the best in that category MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY I acknowledge that it is odd that I found a 39 sports autobiography to be the best book in this category, but I found this to be thoroughly enjoyable read. The cover has a blurb from Playboy saying it was the "best sports book of the year." They may have been right - it is very good. If you are an old fan of NASCAR, this will be a fantastic read for you. *** King Richard I: The Autobiography of America's Greatest Auto Racer by Richard Petty with William Neely. A Paper Orchestra by Michael Jamin. Brian Epstein: A Life from Beginning to End by Hourly History. Our Subway Baby by Peter Mercurio. John Wesley Hardin: A Life from Beginning to End by Hou...
Read more

DRAGONS of WINTER NIGHT: DRAGONLANCE CHRONICLES, BOOK TWO (audiobook) by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Image
Originally published in book form in 1985. Audiobook published by Audible Studios in 2013. Read by Paul Boehmer. Duration: 17 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: The war against the Dragon Queen continues. The forces of good pulled off a major victory at the end of the last novel, but now the forces of evil are looking for revenge.  Tanis, Flint, Goldmoon, Laurana, and the rest of the intrepid companions head off in search of new ways to fight the Dragon Queen's advancing armies. Or, if that fails - lead a refugee exodus. They use an ancient map from before the Cataclysm to find a legendary seaport only to find that it is no longer anywhere near the sea due to the immense destruction of the Cataclysm. As the companions try to figure out their next steps, an armada of dragons attacks the city, breathing flames from above. Dragon Army ground troops swarm into the city and the companions are split into two groups while Tanis faces the decision of a lifetime. My Review: This is a ...
Read more

GRANT and LEE: VICTORIOUS AMERICAN and VANQUISHED VIRGINIAN by Edward H. Bonekemper III

Image
Originally published in 2007. Edward Bonekemper was a Civil War historian who came to the game kind of late in life - after he retired as an attorney for the federal government.  However, he brings his skills as an attorney to this book. Imagine a regulatory attorney bringing all of his research to bear in order to win a case by simply  overwhelming the other side with binder after binder of evidence. In this case, the evidence is almost 200 pages of appendices, endnotes, and a bibliography.  Bonekemper makes an argument in this book that Grant was undoubtedly the superior general when compared to Lee. In fact, he makes the arguments that Grant was the best general in the Civil War by far and Lee squandered his soldiers and his resources by going on the offense almost all of the time. Being the best general does not mean Grant made no mistakes. It does not mean Grant was perfect. Bonekemper acknowledges mistakes by Grant in every campaign and gives Lee his due from time t...
Read more

DRAGONS of SPRING DAWNING (Dragonlance Chronicles, Book 3) (audiobook) by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Image
Originally published in 1985. Audiobook published in 2012 by Audible Studios. Duration: 16 hours, 26 minutes. Read by Paul Boehmer' Unabridged. I distinctly remember loving this series 40 years ago and excitedly visiting my local bookstore to pick up a new one when they were published. I was an avid player of Dungeons and Dragons and a book series released by the publishers of Dungeons and Dragons was a guaranteed win. As the series continued to print new books, I kept on buying them. I probably owned dozen or so of them. Somewhere along the way I sold off my Dragonlance collection. I worked part time at a used bookstore at one point and they probably ended up there. When I found the books in audiobook format, I decided that it was time to revisit these books and see if they held up to my memories of uncritical acclaim. Synopsis: In The Dragons of Spring Dawning , the forces of the Dragon Queen are rolling up victory after victory. But, rather than confidently rolling up the scatt...
Read more

DARK SKY (Joe Pickett #21) (audiobook) by C.J. Box

Image
  Published by Recorded Books in 2021. Read by David Chandler. Duration: 9 hours, 31 minutes. Unabridged. Winner of the Spur Award for Western Contemporary Novel (2022) Synopsis: Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett is good at his job and is known for dealing honestly with everyone. Usually, it's a good thing to have a great reputation. But, it can also mean that people dump the uncomfortable jobs on you because they know you will do them. The new Governor of Wyoming has an idea that will pick up his slumping poll numbers - he will convince a tech mogul to build his latest server farm in Wyoming. He hopes that the prestige and, more importantly, new high-paying jobs will help the voting public overlook his scandals when it comes time for re-election. The tech mogul is sort of a combination of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerburg. He has new skills he wants to master and the current skill he wants to master is providing himself with all of his own food. He gardens and hunts everything and he is...
Read more

THE 1619 PROJECT: A NEW ORIGIN STORY by Nikole Hannah-Jones and others.

Image
  Published in November of 2021 by Random House Audio. Multicast Performance Duration: 18 hours, 57 minutes. Unabridged. I have developed a new hobby as of late - I read books that politicians tell people they should not read. The former governor of Indiana (and later the President of Purdue University) tried to prohibit Indiana University (or anyone else) to use a well-known history book to teach anyone anywhere. I read it. The Lt. Governor of Texas cancelled a book reading about the Alamo because it was not a hero worship book. There's a politician in Texas that  posted a list of 850 books  that he wants to ban across the state that has provided a lot of potential reading.  But, in the last couple of years nothing, absolutely nothing, has compared to the  1619 Project and the controversy it has generated. If you have not heard of the original 1619 Project , you have not been paying attention to America's culture wars. President Trump hated it so much he...
Read more

DOCTOR WHO: DESTINY of the DOCTOR #3: VENGEANCE of the STONES (audiobook) by Andrew Smith

Image
Published in 2013 by AudioGo (Blackstone/BBC)   Read by Richard Franklin and Trevor Littledale Duration: 1 hour Unabridged. As a part of the 50th Anniversary celebration of Doctor Who, the BBC released a series of audiobooks called Destiny of the Doctor . Each of the Doctors has a 1 hour audiobook story. In Vengeance of the Stones  the Doctor and UNIT are called in to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a RAF fighter jet from the skies above Scotland. While the Doctor is poking around he encounters Lt. Mike Yates for the first time (who becomes Captain Mike Yates and a companion in the television series).  The Doctor soon discovers that the disappearance of the jet is the work of an alien species that has a ancient grudge against humanity and that they are the reason for the prevalence of so many recumbent stone circles in this area.  A recumbent stone circle in Scotland. Photo by Bill McKelvie Also, he discovers that these aliens are more t...
Read more

LOVE YOUR ENEMIES: HOW DECENT PEOPLE CAN SAVE AMERICA from the CULTURE of CONTEMPT (audiobook) by Arthur C. Brooks

Image
Published by HarperAudio in March of 2019. Read by Will Damron. Duration: 6 hours, 55 minutes. Unabridged. Arthur C. Brooks was the President of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute from 2008 to shortly after the publication of this book in 2019.  Brooks is deeply worried with the present level of political discourse in America. Debates where the candidates just insult one another. Derogatory comments rather than actual proposals. Look at your typical Facebook political argument. Anonymous posters with names like "Trump_2020_Forever" arguing with "Trumpsters_Suck" and using terms like "libtards" and "conservacunts" while they insist that the other side is nothing but a literal bunch of communists and Nazis. This is getting us nowhere. And that is his point in Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt . What we are showing each other is contempt. He quotes a couples' counselor ...
Read more