This
crime thriller is a sequel to the 1995 movie Heat, which I think I saw but do not remember at all. No matter.
I loved this book anyway, and I think it stands just fine on its own, although
at times the multiple timelines confused me.
Also, there are two groups of bad guys.
One group of bad guys, led by Neil McCauley, although they are really
bad, sometimes do good things, but the other group of bad guys, led by Otis
Wardell, are psychopathically bad to their core. Then we have the good guys, primarily Detective
Vincent Hanna, who is no saint himself.
He has a drug problem and doesn’t think twice about pushing a bad guy
off a roof. The two groups of bad guys
cross paths at one point, resulting in your typical bloodbath. Years later, although earlier in the book,
Chris Shiherlis, who thinks of McCauley as a brother by another mother, lands
in Paraguay, ready to start a whole new chapter in his life. Shiherlis, rather than Detective Hanna,
attains main-character status in this book, as he takes sides in a business war
between competing Chinese families in Paraguay.
He eventually becomes involved in business activities that I never fully
understood, but I do know these activities generally involved less overt violence
than some of the heists he and McCauley pulled off. Otis Wardell, on the other hand, keeps turning
up like a bad penny, leaving tortured and bludgeoned bodies in his wake. He is one scary, evil dude. If gory stories make you queasy, skip this
one, but personally I would rather read this kind of stuff than see it in
living color on the screen. All that said, I still hope there’s a movie.
