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Michael Mann’s First Novel, a Sequel to Heat , Is a Work of Obsession

Michael Mann has spent decades of his life thinking about his 1995 crime epic, Heat . Specifically, the dynamic between its two protagonists, LAPD detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) and professional thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), had transfixed him as far back as the 1970s, when the Chicago detective Chuck Adamson planted the germ of a movie idea in the director’s head. Adamson told Mann about the time he got coffee with the real-life McCauley, and about how he and the thief developed a mutual respect for each other before Adamson’s team later killed McCauley in the street. Mann began writing and eventually used that basic premise for his 1989 TV movie, L.A. Takedown , before expanding on it six years later in Heat , a ludicrously ambitious, almost-three-hour movie that uses Hanna’s and McCauley’s entwined fates as the narrative backbone of a sprawling L.A. crime saga.

In the nearly three decades since its release, Heat has accrued an obsessive fan base and seemingly never strayed too far from Mann’s thoughts. In early 2020, the director undertook his version of a quarantine project by diving into work on his first novel, Heat 2 , a 466-page tome that functions as both prequel and sequel to Heat , with the action cutting back and forth between a storyline set in 1988 and another that details the aftermath of the events in the film. Working alongside his co-author, the thriller writer Meg Gardiner, Mann clocked in long hours meticulously researching and writing a book that he hoped would read like “a really good screenplay in narrative form.” It’s a pulpy, expansive crime novel that feels of a piece with Mann’s filmography, from its hypercompetent, ambitious characters to the richly detailed underworlds they operate in. Oh, and it includes the phrase “sky-daddy shit.” (Warning: Some spoilers ahead.)

Vincent’s still obsessed with Neil years after the final showdown

Heat has no shortage of compelling supporting characters, but Mann’s ongoing obsession with the world he created still seems to revolve, first and foremost, around the idea that Hanna and McCauley are perfect foils for each other — just two damaged dudes who are committed to their jobs at the expense of everything else, and who understand that only one of them will survive their inevitable collision. (I’m sure some steamy fan-fiction exists out there somewhere.) Heat 2 deepens that entanglement, revealing that McCauley and Hanna unknowingly circled each other in Chicago in 1988, when the former pulled off at least one major heist and the latter worked as a detective before his move to L.A. In the post- Heat timeline, Hanna unearths some of the more redeeming elements of McCauley’s past and realizes that he can’t quite shake his obsession with McCauley and his crew even after their fatal showdown at the end of Heat .

The book reveals the origins of iconic moments from the film

As in all of his movies, Mann developed detailed backstories for each of Heat ’s major characters while prepping the film. (“Even before I shot it, I knew what Neil was doing at age 11,” he told the Times .) While some of those details made it to the screen in Heat , Heat 2 gives Mann an opportunity to show off more of that legwork, providing a glimpse into McCauley’s and Hanna’s childhoods, the specifics of their deployments to Vietnam, and a bit more about how McCauley and Chris Shiherlis (played by Val Kilmer in the movie) became each other’s closest confidants. For those curious if McCauley reads anything aside from books about metals, Heat 2 explains that his personal philosophy was shaped by his time spent reading Camus in the prison library.

While these details are occasionally divulged in exposition dumps, more often they’re used to lay the groundwork for whatever set piece the book is hurtling toward next, such as when McCauley plans a heist near the Mexican border and articulates the assault plan in terms of Vietcong strategies he witnessed in combat. At times, Mann and Gardiner use the prequel portion of the book to directly explain the origins of iconic moments from the film (e.g., McCauley’s “30 seconds” mantra ), but even those instances tend to feel motivated by the story rather than like cheap ploys to get readers to do the Leo pointing meme .

There’s a bit of Thief and Miami Vice in it, too

Over the course of his long career, Mann has amassed untold amounts of research into various niche topics, from serial-killer psychology to cybercrime to 18th-century hunting techniques. The world of Heat offers him a big enough canvas to contain nearly all of those obsessions, and part of the fun of Heat 2 lies in watching its authors pull ideas and tiny details from across Mann’s entire filmography. A Thief -esque vault heist early in the book foregrounds the kind of process-oriented details that Mann fans rejoice over, such as which specific drill bit cuts best through poured concrete and how to bypass the relocking mechanism on a safety-deposit box. In the post- Heat timeline, a subplot involving malware recalls Blackhat , while a segment in Ciudad del Este, a free-trade zone in Paraguay, allows Mann to utilize a setting that was originally intended for the ending of Miami Vice (2006).

It finds a villain to follow in Waingro’s footsteps

While the cat-and-mouse game between Hanna and McCauley anchors the film, it can be difficult to keep track of Heat ’s many subplots. There’s the part about a teenage Natalie Portman’s suicide attempt (a baffling character arc, and one that the book acknowledges before wisely sidestepping) and the thread about a serial killer named Waingro (Kevin Gage) who goes around murdering sex workers in his free time. Part of Heat ’s enduring magic is that it keeps the audience equally invested in both Hanna and McCauley, and it does so, in part, by pitting them both against Waingro, who embodies pure evil and declares himself the “Grim Reaper” at one point in the film.

Heat 2 finds a successor to Waingro in Otis Wardell, a thief who commits a series of home-invasion robberies and also likes to rape and murder his victims. Where McCauley is a professional criminal whose only endgame is the next score, Wardell is a chaos agent who gets off on violence. At various points, he becomes a problem for both Hanna and McCauley, and his arc helps tie together the book’s disparate timelines (arguably, a bit too neatly).

The sex scenes are … unforgettable

In his movies, Mann repeatedly subjects his self-serious, male protagonists to plots with operatic stakes. He pushes them to emotional extremes, so that when they fall in love — usually with a beautiful woman — they fall hard. (“For me, the sun rises and sets with her, man,” as Chris says of Charlene in Heat. ) For all their displays of borderline campy masculinity, Mann’s movies are earnestly romantic, including Heat , which is punctuated by long interludes in which Neil and Eady (Amy Brenneman) spill their guts to each other while the synths of Terje Rypdal’s soundtrack blare in the background.

That same romantic impulse is present in Heat 2 , but it doesn’t translate to the page as naturally as the action set pieces, which allow Mann to fall back on a visceral, pulpy style of prose (more than once, a bullet hits someone with the force of a “punch from a giant”). Instead, he sometimes resorts to clunky metaphors — one of them describes a woman who wants to have sex for the second time in one night as “a fighter pilot who has landed on an F-18 carrier deck. With the engines at max power, she’s ready to accelerate and take to the sky again.” Hopefully, the potential film adaptation drops the jet-fighter metaphors and lets an Audioslave song set the mood instead.

What’s next for Heat ?

What is Heat without its movie stars? Much of the movie’s iconography is tied to its actors — even someone who doesn’t worship at the altar of Mann can probably recall that Heat is the first time De Niro and Pacino acted opposite each other, and just one viewing of the film will inevitably burn a few of Pacino’s line readings into your frontal cortex. Heat 2 , though, paints complete enough portraits of its characters to allow you to imagine them separately from the stars who played them, making a film adaptation with new actors easier to imagine. Mann — who turned 79 earlier this year and is currently at work on his Enzo Ferrari biopic — has teased that a Heat 2 adaptation is already on the way and that it’ll be a “very large movie.” As for who will step in as Hanna and McCauley, Pacino’s got a few ideas .

Heat 2 hits bookstores August 9.

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by Michael Mann & Meg Gardiner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2022

A book hardcore fans of Mann's film may enjoy but others will dismiss as unneeded.

A combination prequel and sequel to the much-admired Mann film that brought together Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.

The movie climaxed in 1995, with Pacino's intense LA cop, Vincent Hanna, shooting and killing De Niro's fatalistic bank thief Neil McCauley, his nemesis and alter ego. In the "before" sections of the novel, set in 1988, Hanna pursues a sadistic home-invading gang of killers and rapists while McCauley plans the heist of millions in cartel money from a truck bound for Mexico. Following McCauley's death and a massive shootout, his wounded right-hand man, Chris Shiherlis (the Val Kilmer character), escapes to South America, where he goes to work for a Taiwanese Paraguayan crime boss. Women figure in the plots: McCauley has an affair in Mexico with Elisa, a “seventh-generation smuggler,” and Chris sleeps with the crime boss’s daughter, Ana, even as he pines for his estranged wife and son. Minus the film's psychological mano a mano between Hanna and McCauley, this nearly 500-page novel, Mann's first, lacks a compelling center. And in Chris, it lacks a compelling protagonist—once a sidekick, always a sidekick. Hanna's fierce efforts to save Elisa's daughter from a mad killer 12 years after her single mother was killed energize the book, leading to an explosive highway chase. But with its unwieldy structure, the novel keeps getting in its own way. And despite the collaboration of seasoned pro Gardiner, the descriptive writing is weak: "Looking into his vacant blue eyes is like staring into the black ocean at night." Ultimately, Mann has written not a self-contained novel, but a novelization of the film sequel the 79-year-old director envisions.

Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-06-265331-4

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022

SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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Awards & Accolades

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

THE SILENT PATIENT

by Alex Michaelides ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2019

Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.

A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.

"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Celadon Books

Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER

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by Alex Michaelides

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SEEN & HEARD

THE HOUSE ACROSS THE LAKE

by Riley Sager ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 2022

A weird, wild ride.

Celebrity scandal and a haunted lake drive the narrative in this bestselling author’s latest serving of subtly ironic suspense.

Sager’s debut, Final Girls (2017), was fun and beautifully crafted. His most recent novels— Home Before Dark (2020) and Survive the Night (2021) —have been fun and a bit rickety. His new novel fits that mold. Narrator Casey Fletcher grew up watching her mother dazzle audiences, and then she became an actor herself. While she never achieves the “America’s sweetheart” status her mother enjoyed, Casey makes a career out of bit parts in movies and on TV and meatier parts onstage. Then the death of her husband sends her into an alcoholic spiral that ends with her getting fired from a Broadway play. When paparazzi document her substance abuse, her mother exiles her to the family retreat in Vermont. Casey has a dry, droll perspective that persists until circumstances overwhelm her, and if you’re getting a Carrie Fisher vibe from Casey Fletcher, that is almost certainly not an accident. Once in Vermont, she passes the time drinking bourbon and watching the former supermodel and the tech mogul who live across the lake through a pair of binoculars. Casey befriends Katherine Royce after rescuing her when she almost drowns and soon concludes that all is not well in Katherine and Tom’s marriage. Then Katherine disappears….It would be unfair to say too much about what happens next, but creepy coincidences start piling up, and eventually, Casey has to face the possibility that maybe some of the eerie legends about Lake Greene might have some truth to them. Sager certainly delivers a lot of twists, and he ventures into what is, for him, new territory. Are there some things that don’t quite add up at the end? Maybe, but asking that question does nothing but spoil a highly entertaining read.

Pub Date: June 21, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-18319-9

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022

PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

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by Riley Sager

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Heat 2, the book sequel to Michael Mann’s film, is ‘fundamentally bizarre’ – but superb

Lecturer in Communications and Media, University of Notre Dame Australia

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Ari Mattes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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There is something fundamentally bizarre about Heat 2 . It’s a sequel, as its name suggests, to writer-director Michael Mann’s classic cops and robbers film, Heat , from 1995. But it’s a novel.

And let’s face it, novelisations – the products of media corporations looking to open more avenues for exploiting their product – are notoriously bad. They’re one rung above Mills & Boon in the publishing/literary hierarchy, virtually glossier versions of fan fiction.

Review: Heat 2 – Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner (HarperCollins)

Heat 2’s strangeness is perhaps best epitomised by the coupling of actors’ names with character mentions on the book’s blurb – though there are no actors in a novel. We are reading a literary sequel to a film. This is weird.

But let’s be clear: Heat 2, written by Mann and crime novelist Meg Gardiner is not a novelisation. It’s a rich, tightly plotted original work set in the story world of the film.

Read more: How crime fiction went global, embracing themes from decolonisation to climate change

Ethereal, electric brutality

Like Heat, the novel’s narrative unfolds in the labyrinthine spaces of post-industrial global capitalism: in the cracks and detritus of modernity, in the non-places.

This is a world where high-tech consumer products sit alongside covert military weapons in the marketplace. Where shopping malls proliferate like airports, with private armies – and where the internet is just one part of a logistical infrastructure forever greasing the wheels of capitalism .

Legal or illegal, it makes no difference, the novel suggests. Only the players change. They seek investment and profit wherever it comes, supported by security and communications systems and informational flows. Mann and Gardiner are clearly awed by the ethereal, electric brutality of this thing, this hyper-object called “free trade.”

We follow protagonist Chris Shiherlis (played by Val Kilmer in the film) following his escape from Los Angeles the day after the film ends. Hiding out in the “Day-Glo fever dream” of “criminal Disneyland”, Ciudad del Este – the Paraguayian free-trade zone city – Chris transforms into a different kind of criminal.

His activities shift from the paramilitary-style robberies of Neil McCauley (played by Robert De Niro in the film) and his crew towards a high-tech, dark-web-savvy kind of global trade, firmly outside of “the combat zones of urban America”. Partnered with local businesswoman Ana Liu, he works to develop and expand their commerce in illegal strategic systems.

Many of the characters from the film are reprised here, and you can virtually credit the actors with much of the writing. Robbery and homicide detective Vincent Hanna, for example, was memorably embodied in the film by Al Pacino. In Heat 2, Hanna is Pacino, and we can hear Pacino’s intonation and delivery in every piece of dialogue.

If anything, Heat 2’s Hanna is even more unhinged than the film version, living in an amphetamine-fuelled electric haze, throwing people off roofs, yelling at suspects in vintage Pacino fashion.

Wry humour and global action

The immersive, detailed world of the film – Mann famously shot Heat across 95 Los Angeles locations, fully embracing neon LA in all its sprawling splendour – is recreated in the novel. But its criminal underworld of stoics and sadists is offset in places by a wry humour. In this era of sequels and remakes, of the relentless merchandising of cinematic universes, there’s something humorous, even, in the banal simplicity of the title: Heat 2.

But perhaps the most impressive aspect of the novel is its seamless plotting of multiple storylines. The narrative spans the globe from 1988 to 2000, crossing North and South America, Singapore, and Indonesia.

The action proper begins in Chicago in 1988 – where Mann launched his cinematic career with the masterpiece, Thief - tracking McCauley and crew in parallel to Hanna, as he hunts for the prime antagonist of the novel: Otis Wardell, a home invader-rapist and all-round bad dude. We follow the organisation and execution of a daring cartel heist south of the border, then follow Shiherlis as he builds a life for himself in a new, non-American world.

But it all comes back to LA – for Mann, one suspects, it always does. The story culminates in the year 2000 in Los Angeles, the whole thing coming together in splendidly operatic fashion. It’s a dazzling crescendo of action supported by a narrative architecture that is simple, yet immensely satisfying.

Read more: GoodFellas at 30: Scorsese's massively influential, virtuoso gangster film

Why a novel?

So, the big question: why a novel and not a film? There may be financial reasons for this – it’s hard and expensive to make a film, even for someone as tried and true as Mann – but the limitations are built into the material itself.

It would have been a travesty to entrust these roles to other actors following the canonical status of Heat. And how could you make a film about characters set several years earlier using the same actors? It probably could have been done with some makeup a couple of years after Heat was released, but by 2022? Forget it. And using CGI to make actors look younger never quite works.

The most important medium-specific aspect of any narrative is, of course, its style. Style is the thing that converts the presentation of information into art – the expressive dimension of a work foundational to its aesthetic qualities.

There have been some exceptionally written, stylistically idiosyncratic popular novels that have been perfectly translated into film. Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon is a great example, made by Mann as Manhunter in 1986. The pop, neon-lit prose of Harris is adapted effortlessly into Mann’s high modernist aesthetic, so that reading the novel and watching the film become strangely similar experiences.

An equivalent thing is at play in Heat 2. Mann/Gardiner’s style perfectly translates the style of Heat into a radically different medium. This is no small feat.

We read prose that interweaves vivid and precise description with expressionistic, existentially charged passages. We are awed, as in the film, by the starkly drawn genre characters, by the melancholic, romantic images of solitary figures battling for survival in a sparkling but meaningless universe of complex and overlapping forces.

In the novel, as in film, sunsets “burn nuclear red”, nights are “starkly clear, moonlit, stars cast about like careless diamonds”, and Hanna is described thus:

Pursuing a sequence of unknowns to its origins in dark and wild places or on the concrete anonymity of cityscape, that action is what made him go.

But the colour never obscures the clarity of the narrative or takes away from its momentum.

At the same time, Mann/Gardiner do things in the novel that simply wouldn’t work in a film. The backstories of characters are presented in the novel as memories, snippets of information, in a way that would seem far too expositional in a film. It works, for example, when we learn in the novel that McCauley read Camus in Folsom Prison. But this detail would be pretentious and annoying in a film.

Mann has always been an auteur interested in what it means to be American. He studied in London, and has approached the question throughout his career with an internationalist sensitivity across multiple films and genres – from his kinetic adaptation of the The Last of the Mohicans (by the godfather of American action novels, James Fenimore Cooper), to the biopic of American boxing icon Muhammad Ali .

This continues in Heat 2, with the literary medium giving him more opportunity to explicitly think about and theorise this Americaness.

Read more: The Godfather at 50: set among the American Mafia of the 40s, Coppola's film is unmistakably a film of the disillusioned 70s

How good is it?

Would this stand alone as a novel outside of its relation to Heat? Possibly not. But then, it’s probably not meant to: it is named Heat 2, after all.

And the dullest part – the only dull part – is the prologue, a six-page recap of the plot of the film that reads like a colourless synopsis. I guess it has to be here for people who haven’t seen the film – but why would they be reading Heat 2?

Is this as good a novel as Heat is a film? Probably not. Heat routinely features in top 50 critic lists and enjoys enduring popularity. Heat 2 is excellent, written in lightning prose with flashes of brilliance, but it probably wouldn’t make anyone’s top 50 list of novels.

That said, its near seamless continuation of the story world of its antecedent makes reading it an incredibly pleasurable experience. And many of the touches that define Mann as an auteur – a hyper-real sense of place, an interest in the brutality and efficiency of global capitalism, a sense of character through surface details – are present in Heat 2.

And it is more effectively written than most mass-market crime novels, with crisp action matched by description vivid in detail, spare in execution.

Indeed, from the frenetic opening to the brilliantly wry final line, Heat 2 is a superb novel. I recommend watching – I mean, reading – it today!

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Heat 2 Brings Michael Mann's Exacting Vision, Improbably, to the Page

I was close to 50 pages into Michael Mann’s Heat 2 —the novel, co-written with novelist Meg Gardiner, that tells the story of the before and after Mann’s 1995 crime drama—when I realized what was missing.

First, I should say: “missing” might not be the right word. Heat 2 is a mini-doorstopper, at over 450 pages, and it couldn’t be more up my alley. I’ve been a Mann devotee since Miami Vice came out when I was four years old and for whatever reason I was allowed to watch it. I was a Mann boy and now I’m a Mann man, so to speak. I’ve been following his work for such a large chunk of my life that the way he shoots things—the look and the vibe of his work—has influenced many of my own stylistic choices. Mann was my gateway drug into so much: old neo-noir films that influenced his work, as well as films from other masters of highly-stylized crime dramas, from Abel Ferrara to John Woo. It's not unlike following legends of hardboiled fiction Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler to modern contemporaries like Walker Mosley, Megan Abbott, and Laura Lippman. And while Mann has served as a writer on his greatest crime films, I’ve been drawn to his stories because they're as good looking as they are engaging. They are, to put it simply, fun and cool : Mann understands how to balance story with wild shootouts and great looks. Movies like Heat and Miami Vice appeal to me on multiple levels.

Heat 2 necessarily reimagines how a Michael Mann story works, since it’s all on the page. There are rumors that it might become something more, but for now the book feels like it’s filling a void more for the creator of the story than devotees like me. That's to say: I was perfectly happy with the nearly three-hour film on its own, and was curious as much as I was stunned that Mann had more to add. But as soon as I started reading it I started to see why Mann wanted this to exist. The novel explains how the film's heist gang, led by Robert De Niro’s Neil McCauley, came together, in a sort of prequel. But we also get the sequel: the things that happened after the events of Heat . It’s two separate stories linked together with the movie. We get a glimpse into the early days of the gang, but also a deeper look into the life and mind of detective Vincent Hanna, played by Al Pacino in the film. 

But by the time I hit page 48 of Heat 2 and read, “Alexander Dalecki—Alex, to the woman snorting lines off the living room table—stands naked at the kitchen counter, pouring Johnnie Walker Black into two glasses,” I knew what felt different. That’s when it truly sunk in that I was reading a Michael Mann story—that I was going to have to change the way I look at his work entirely. I liked the challenge. I loved that even though I couldn’t see the table, I was pretty sure it was made of chrome , maybe with a leather couch nearby. And what sort of glasses were they drinking from? I imagine heavy crystal, some not-quite-Baccarat sort of thing. I didn’t want to know these things to nitpick, though. It’s a book! And a sick book, at that! It wouldn’t be fair to expect Mann and Gardiner to go full laundry-list on the clothing, furniture, cars, and accessories in their novel. It would probably make for a worse book. But the experience reminded me that Mann has always been a director obsessed with aesthetics and atmosphere. And while reading a Mann story is great, seeing and hearing it is a totally different experience.

Robert De Niro and Val Kilmer in Heat 's iconic bank shootout scene.

Each new Mann project shares a similar quality: it’s almost always simultaneously aesthetically of its time, but also way ahead of things. The whole idea for Miami Vice , for instance, can be summed up as “cop show plus MTV”: a formula tailor-made for its release in the ‘80s, but that, seen from today’s vantage point, seems the epitome of retro. There’s always this long strange gap, between when a Mann movie feels perfect and when it feels perfect again: being very closely tied to a specific time means you run the risk of feeling dated when that time has passed. I recall rewatching Miami Vice 20 years after it came out and thinking it looked so 1980 ; Heat similarly felt extremely ‘90s a decade after its release. And, somewhat tellingly, Mann’s 2006 film version of Miami Vice , starring Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, was a box office success—but the critics weren’t as into it. One wrote, “Unlike the TV series, Miami Vice takes itself too seriously to be trashy—and too seriously to be much fun either,” while another felt, “It can look cool. But more often, as we wait for the lightning that never arrives, it frustrates.” At the time, people felt the movie was too post-9/11 gloomy and somber.

But the thing about Mann’s work is that, while it initially ages horribly, over the long run it matures into something spectacular. A decade and a half later years later, critics are writing about how Miami Vice went from “ Misfire to Masterpiece ,” quite possibly the only “ cult favorite ” I can think of that also happened to debut at number one and make $164 million at the box office. He has always had an eye (and an ear; the soundtracks are always top-notch) for details, the things that make scenes pop. All the blue light bouncing off of white marble or glass in Heat , the blinking lights of 1980s Chicago shining off of James Caan as he leans up against a beam in Thief , Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas pulling up a Ferrari Daytona Spyder 365 GTS/4 to a phone booth under a neon sign as Phil Collins sings “In the Air Tonight.” These were all very specific choices and have left a lasting impact for a reason.

Heat 2 doesn’t have to contend with that. A film version might, but as a book that’s out in 2022 and set in both the late-1980s and mid-1990s, it’s basically Michael Mann historical fiction. That’s not something I ever thought I’d type, but given the opportunity, I wish there was even more of it now. It gave me a better understanding into how the creator of Heat saw an even bigger world, but also made me appreciate a guy whose work I’ve literally grown up on. That sort of thing doesn’t happen very often.

There are plenty of other directors who have great vision, who understand the style of a moment and how a certain song can truly capture the mood. But Mann’s whole thing is a trust in his own vision and an absolute belief that little details are a must. The guy seems to operate on a creative level not dissimilar from the one inhabited by some of the great fashion designers, who know that new seasons require new trends, but that good taste is timeless. Being able to turn that into a great story, whether Heat on the big screen or Heat 2 in a book, is a trick few besides Mann can pull off. There’s sex, violence, cool cars, bright lights, and a whole lot of grit. It all works together. When a character is at the Beverly Hilton—where “everything gleams,” including the “Lamborghini and the Bugatti parked outside the entrance, placed like ornaments,"—I kept thinking, Man, I can see that…in a Michael Mann movie. I want to see that in a Michael Mann movie. And if that doesn’t happen, then I’m happy I read it in a Michael Mann novel.

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Heat 2: A Novel Hardcover – August 9, 2022

Instant #1  New York Times  Bestseller!

Michael Mann, four-time-Oscar-nominated writer-director of  The Last of the Mohicans ,  The Insider ,  Ali ,  Miami Vice ,  Collateral , and  Heat  teams up with Edgar Award–winning author Meg Gardiner to deliver Mann’s first novel, an explosive return to the universe and characters of his classic crime film—with an all-new story unfolding in the years before and after the iconic movie

“A hard-boiled, cinematic read that moves as fast as a well-planned heist.” — Esquire

One day after the end of  Heat , Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) is holed up in Koreatown, wounded, half delirious, and desperately trying to escape LA. Hunting him is LAPD detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). Hours earlier, Hanna killed Shiherlis’s brother in arms Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) in a gunfight under the strobe lights at the foot of an LAX runway. Now Hanna’s determined to capture or kill Shiherlis, the last survivor of McCauley’s crew, before he ghosts out of the city.

In 1988, seven years earlier, McCauley, Shiherlis, and their highline crew are taking scores on the West Coast, the US-Mexican border, and now in Chicago. Driven, daring, they’re pulling in money and living vivid lives. And Chicago homicide detective Vincent Hanna—a man unreconciled with his history—is following his calling, the pursuit of armed and dangerous men into the dark and wild places, hunting an ultraviolent gang of home invaders.

Meanwhile, the fallout from McCauley’s scores and Hanna’s pursuit cause unexpected repercussions in a parallel narrative, driving through the years following  Heat .

Heat 2  projects its dimensional and richly drawn men and women into whole new worlds—from the inner sanctums of rival crime syndicates in a South American free-trade zone to transnational criminal enterprises in Southeast Asia. The novel brings you intimately into these lives. In Michael Mann’s Heat universe, they will confront new adversaries in lethal circumstances beyond all boundaries.

Heat 2  is engrossing, moving, and tragic—a masterpiece of crime fiction with the same extraordinary ambitions, scope, and rich characterizations as the epic film.

• Print length 480 pages
• Language English
• Publisher William Morrow
• Publication date August 9, 2022
• Dimensions 6 x 1.45 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 0062653318
• ISBN-13 978-0062653314
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

“Propulsive.” — Sam Sifton,  New York Times

“ Heat 2  is just dynamite.” — Associated Press

“Mann's long relationship with his central protagonists, and fondness for research, are evident on almost every page of this propulsive universe-expansion. . . . Reading this novel, and the cliffhanger ending, definitely leaves you wanting another book set in the same world.” — Entertainment Weekly

“Mann’s brooding moments of sublime isolation are there in abundance, combined with Gardiner’s deft touch for modern thrillers. The result is an intensely satisfying crime story.” — Crimereads

"Riveting. . . . The best thing about this innovative tale is the way the fully fleshed human stories support and even transcend the often-breathtaking action." — Booklist [starred review]

“Prepare for an epic journey of the seven years before the bank heist that would change all of their lives and the events that unfold afterward, bringing in a new cast of riveting characters. . . The world of international drug cartels and crime syndicates has never been so gripping. Heat was a cinematic spectacle, and this sequel manages to create the same immersive experience in written form.”  — Library Journal (starred review)

" Heat 2 is a must for fans of the film." — USA Today

"A hard-boiled, cinematic read that moves as fast as a well-planned heist. If you were obsessed with  Heat , you’ll want  Heat 2  to last." — Esquire

"A genuinely exhilarating expansion of the movie’s world, complete . . . some truly jaw-dropping, bullet-filled set pieces." — Rolling Stone

"An expansive crime novel that feels of a piece with Mann’s filmography, from its hypercompetent, ambitious characters to the richly detailed underworlds they operate in." — Vulture

“ Heat 2 is a fascinating book . . . [that] brings Michael Mann's exacting vision, improbably, to the page.” — GQ

"Told in a style as propulsive and cinematic as the film, Heat 2 is an exciting and engrossing tale." — AV Club

“ Heat 2 moves at a near breakneck pace, sweeping us along like an addictive film. The result is an action-packed page-turner that fully engulfs us in the moody, bloody, romantic worlds Mann creates in his films.” — Slash Film

"Mann’s stunning prequel/sequel to his 1995 classic. . . an intoxicatingly relentless gem. . . a novel to be devoured more than once." — The Film Stage

“There is something kind of wonderful about making the prequel/sequel a novel rather than a film… Mann and Gardiner have produced an excellent thriller. . . Heat 2  goes full  The Godfather Part II .” — Austin Chronicle

“ Heat 2 is a classic of the crime genre . . . Realism permeates Mann’s world, and the world he created in  Heat  was rich enough for the writer-director to decide that he needed to expand the universe further. . . . It dives deeper into the rich criminal underworld and complicated lives of his thieves and cops. . . . If you’re a fan of the crime genre, you can only hope we get more from [Mann] and his crew soon.”  — The Spectator World

“This will be a must for fans of the movie, but the novel stands on its own too, as an epic L.A. crime feast.” — Vanessa Cronin, Amazon Editor

“ Heat 2  tees up intricately choreographed set pieces. . . that play in the mind’s eye and pump the accelerator with mounting, marauding excitement, marvels of controlled chaos.” — Air Mail

"For those of you who can’t get enough of his 1995 film  Heat , widely and reasonably regarded as his masterpiece, well, now there’s  Heat 2,  a gritty, vivid, 468-page second helping that delivers the goods and also goes to surprising new places.” — Museum of Moving Images

“Michael Mann’s Heat is one of my all-time favorite movies. Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner’s Heat 2 is now one of my favorite suspense novels. The voice of this book is a brilliant melding of the way we talk and the way we think. I must confess I did put the novel down occasionally, but only because I didn’t want it to end. I’m already quoting lines from Heat 2 to my writer friends (shamelessly saying the lines are mine).” — James Patterson

“ Heat 2 is a brilliant and riveting novel with rich and real characters and powerhouse storytelling that represents one of the most authentic evocations of criminals and the cops who hunt them down that I’ve ever read. The first novel from Michael Mann (and Meg Gardiner) is a tour de force that works as a standalone but also honors, deepens, and expands Mann’s iconic film by placing all the key characters in an intricately detailed and emotionally involving new story that takes place before and after Heat .” — Don Winslow

“FANTASTIC!... It’s incredible! Absolutely LOVED IT!” — Jack Carr

"The novel glistens with the cool Mann became famous for in his hip, shiny TV series “Miami Vice,” the great, claustrophobic film “Collateral,” and, of course, “Heat” . . . . I can't wait to experience the next installment." — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"The best novel of 2022 (or any other year) . . . . Mann orders you to see what he sees and, if you've watched any of his movies, the connection between his words and his signature filmmaking is instant. If you haven't watched any of his movies, you'll end up wanting to." — SF Gate

“ Heat 2 gives us an exciting, emotionally rich thriller, with just as much style and panache as Michael Mann's original classic heist movie. I loved it.” — Adrian McKinty, #1 international bestselling author

“Awesome! This novel is a stunning achievement in character study, narrative form and action. I am in awe. A stunning page-turner every bit as masterful as the original movie. Easily one of the finest novels of the year!” — Steve Cavanagh, #1 international bestselling author

" Heat 2 is an action-packed epic reviving beloved characters from a globally celebrated film. It is also a moving meditation on commitment—the rewards and the costs of giving your all. Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner have deepened the legacy of Heat —and given us one hell of a page-turner. A stunning, mammoth achievement." — Bill Beverly, author of Dodgers

"This audacious, powerhouse of a novel brings to the page everything the classic crime film Heat brought to the screen. . . Drawn by Mann and Gardiner with psychological and emotional gravity, the characters live their lives of crime and violence on the edge of a razor. The plot and the set-pieces of shootouts, heists, and crime-scene investigation are nails. The characters’ motives are obsessive. The details of police work and criminal enterprise, precise and revealing. The banter is quick and smart and memorable. And the metaphors and descriptions conjure up vivid, original images worthy of Mann’s best big movies." — Eric Rickstad, New York Times bestselling author 

“[An] action-packed thriller.”  — Denver Post

About the Author

Michael Mann  is a world-renowned director, screenwriter, producer, and one of the most innovative and influential filmmakers in American cinema. Mann has written and directed award-winning television movies and series (including  Miami Vice  and  Crime Story ) and feature films including  Manhunter ,  The Last of the Mohicans ,  Heat ,  The Insider ,  Ali , and  Miami Vice . He has produced numerous feature films, including Academy Award-winner  The Aviator  (directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett) and directed several commercially successful, critically acclaimed projects including the feature film  Collateral  (starring Tom Cruise) and the pilot for the HBO series  Luck  (starring Dustin Hoffman). Mann has won many prestigious awards, including a BAFTA for Best Film ( The Aviator ), a Golden Globe for Best Picture/Drama ( The Aviator ), and an NBR Award for Best Director ( Collateral ). Mann lives in Los Angeles.

Meg Gardiner  is the author of sixteen acclaimed, award-winning novels. Her thrillers have been bestsellers in the U.S. and internationally and have been translated into more than twenty languages.  China Lake  won an Edgar Award and  UNSUB , the first in Gardiner’s acclaimed UNSUB series, won a Barry Award. Her third UNSUB novel,  The Dark Corners of the Night , has been bought by Amazon Studios for development as a television series. A former lawyer, three-time  Jeopardy!  champion, and two-time president of Mystery Writers of America, Gardiner lives in Austin, Texas. 

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Morrow (August 9, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062653318
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062653314
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.4 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.45 x 9 inches
• #207 in TV, Movie & Game Tie-In Fiction
• #776 in Murder Thrillers
• #2,670 in Suspense Thrillers

About the authors

Meg gardiner.

Meg Gardiner is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of seventeen thrillers. Her latest is Shadowheart, featuring FBI profiler Caitlin Hendrix. The Real Book Spy calls it “A mind-trip of a story.” Booklist says, “As always, the writing is exquisite and the story is perfectly crafted.” UNSUB, the first novel in the series, won the 2018 Barry Award for Best Thriller. The Dark Corners of the Night was bought by Amazon Studios for development as an hour-long television drama.

Her previous novel, Heat 2, is a prequel/sequel to the film Heat, co-authored with the film’s writer/director, Michael Mann. It debuted at #1 on the NYT best seller list.

Meg is the author of the Evan Delaney series, the Jo Beckett novels, and several stand alones. China Lake won the 2009 Edgar award for Best Paperback Original. The Nightmare Thief won the 2012 Audie Award for Thriller/Suspense audiobook of the year. Phantom Instinct was one of O, the Oprah magazine's "Best Books of Summer."

A graduate of Stanford Law School in California, Meg practiced law in Los Angeles and taught writing at the University of California Santa Barbara. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Michael Mann

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Customers find the writing quality good and well-crafted. They also describe the storyline as exciting, cinematic, and scary. Readers say the characters are well developed. They describe the pacing as well-paced and intense. Opinions are mixed on the writing style, with some finding it well-written and others finding it confusing and lazily written.

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Customers find the writing quality of the book really good, worthy, and well done. They also say it's interesting, detailed, and incredibly smart. Customers also say the book is a solid and exciting story.

"...He is menacing, scary, mysterious, and incredibly smart , making him a force to be reckoned with by all of the characters, present in almost every..." Read more

"...It could make a tremendous miniseries , although having to recast all the indelible characters from the original movie could really put a damper on it." Read more

"Just finished reading the book; it was a great read overall , minus some characters and plots that left me conflicted...." Read more

"...Over the years.“Heat 2” is a worthy follow up and has all the elements of Mann’s Cops and Robbers world...." Read more

Customers find the storyline exciting, with great action pieces and pulpy style prose. They also say the book is an excellent literary prequel and sequel that continues the classic tradition. Readers also mention the international intrigue is multifaceted, strong, and cinematic.

"...Not so with this new villain! He is menacing, scary, mysterious , and incredibly smart, making him a force to be reckoned with by all of the..." Read more

"What a great story . I'm not sure I was prepared for everything that ended up happening after the original story...." Read more

"...The story (or interwoven stories) has a lot of heart-pounding action , and it's easy to picture the established characters moving through their..." Read more

"...sections (Wardell, Elisa, Gabriela etc) were memorable and integral to the story ; so too were the recurring characters of McCauley's and Hanna's..." Read more

Customers like the well developed characters in the book.

"...has a lot of heart-pounding action, and it's easy to picture the established characters moving through their environments...." Read more

"...The writing is superb, and the characters are carefully woven to depict the original with the addition of true psychopaths...." Read more

"... Characters are as vivid and explosive as the story...." Read more

"...I could not put this book down. It has every main character from the movie , along with some new ones. And they are all awesome...." Read more

Customers find the pacing of the book well paced, fast moving, and like a runaway train. They also say the book is egrossing and seems to fly by.

"...helpfully clarified some of the complex set pieces, the pacing is brisk and cinematic ...." Read more

"...I'm pouring through the novel already... so it flows well like a thriller should . Meg + Michael do a great job of fleshing out the characters...." Read more

"...This book is so egrossing, it seems to fly by , but the characters and plot never lag...." Read more

"...The pages just flew by . A compelling read for sure. Cannot wait for a sequel." Read more

Customers find the plot intense, hard-boiled, and propulsive, keeping them riveted. They also say the book gets better and takes off on a real page turner. Customers also say it has the same gritty feel as the movie.

"...scene and shootout from the film, but it is equally thrilling and intense ...." Read more

"...it though in my opinion the book gets a lot better and takes off on a real page turner . If you liked the movie, you should like this book...." Read more

"...The writing is hard-boiled and propulsive, keeping you riveted - until we get to Paraguay, where the story starts to hit some false notes...." Read more

"Wow as good as it gets, intense read that kept me wanting more! Hope a 3 rd book is in making." Read more

Customers appreciate the book's detail. They say it has rich characters and a story worthy of its page.

"...my favorite films, and this novel made it even better by giving more depth and richness to a story I've loved for 27 years...." Read more

"...crime thriller that seamlessly weaved together to form a tight, intricate , and outstanding read. Primo stuff...." Read more

"...everything Mann/Gardiner promised that it would be: rich in character, detail , and story worthy of its page-turner designation...." Read more

" Every detail in this book is spot on . I look forward to the film and hopeful the movie can make the details in the book come to life!..." Read more

Customers find the book's heat to be reborn.

"...This is a sequel worthy of the Heat legacy and I loved every page!" Read more

"...The Heat universe truly has been reborn . I think there might be one more bunch of Heat stories to tell." Read more

" Heat 2 is a great read ...." Read more

"... Heat was good ; Heat 2 is exceptional.Once you begin you won’t want to stop…" Read more

Customers are mixed about the writing style. Some find the book well-written, with punchy sentences and an electric, quick read. Others say the writing isn't great, with slow pacing, mediocre dialogue, and superfluous descriptors. They also say the book is complex and hard to follow at times.

"...The writing is superb , and the characters are carefully woven to depict the original with the addition of true psychopaths...." Read more

"...Although the writing is pulpy and repetitive and given to vague sentence fragments where better description would have helpfully clarified some of..." Read more

"The novel is well written . The characters are well developed and the tone feels like the movie Heat...." Read more

"...certain parts would effect me for days, staying in my mind, really powerful writing ...." Read more

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, black writers week, heat 2 offers thrilling sequel to classic michael mann film.

If Michael Mann ’s 1995 masterpiece “Heat” was a cat-and-mouse game, the novel sequel to it is the whole damn farm. Aware that he’s not restricted by elements like budget or runtime, Mann and co-writer Meg Gardiner cram their already-bestselling  Heat 2 with so many characters, subplots, and settings that it sometimes struggles to hold together under the weight of it all. It’s interesting to see such a lean, taut film universe literally explode into stories of multiple crime squads across two entirely different time periods. And, while it can get bulky, there are multiple sequences that are so vividly rendered through prose that one can picture how Mann would (and maybe will) film them someday. 

Once again, Mann unpacks the criminal underworld, examining how connections influence behavior on both sides of the law. This is not just a story of men who are willing to leave everything behind if they feel the heat around the corner, it’s about how these same men have an almost animalistic sense of one another, able to predict behavior and see through bullshit in ways most people cannot. It can be overwhelming, and hinges on a new character that connects its timelines in a way that might be too much for some people's suspension of disbelief, but there’s such energy and passion in Mann’s and Gardiner’s storytelling that the novel’s structural flaws and contrivances can be forgiven.

The first few pages of Heat 2 serve as a recap of the film, which I highly recommend revisiting before reading, not only because it’s a masterpiece but because it will enhance your understanding of these characters before returning to them. At the end of “Heat,” most of the crew of Neil McCauley ( Robert De Niro ) was dead. Neil himself was shot by Vincent Hanna ( Al Pacino ), holding the detective’s hand as his life left his body. The only real person to escape the action of “Heat” was Chris Shiherlis ( Val Kilmer ), and one of the timelines of Heat 2 centers Chris as he first tries to escape Los Angeles and later gets into trouble in Paraguay. The other goes back in time, visiting Chicago in 1988, where Hanna investigates a series of horrific home invasions that, believe it or not, have a tie to McCauley & Shiherlis, who are in the Windy City on a job of their own, and when Chris first meets and woos Charlene ( Ashley Judd ).

The flashback timeline of Heat 2 hums with vicious intensity. Mann and Gardiner describe the home invasions with terrifying detail and feel like they’re embracing Pacino’s take on Hanna. (He encounters one of the home invaders with a “Surprise, motherf**kers!” and one can picture mid-‘90s Pacino shouting the line.) The Hanna of “Heat” is a little world-wearier than this one, meaning a character who was already intense is even more so in flashback. One of the biggest problems of an adaptation of this novel, which Mann reportedly wants to make, will be finding a modern actor with that ‘80s Pacino fearlessness.

However, Hanna is only a small part of Heat 2 . After a breakneck first-third of the novel that takes place largely in Chicago, the epic novel shifts gears into South America, centering the melancholic Chris, pining over his lost family and trying to find a way home again. If the flashbacks of Heat 2 have the energy of the original film, the other half of the novel feels more like “ Thief ,” a tale of someone aware that his best days may be behind him but who is too much of a shark to stop swimming.

All of this expansive narrative unfolds with the precision that readers might expect from a craftsman like Mann. The best chunks of Heat 2 are lean and mean, propelled with brief, punchy sentences that somehow convey more mood and detail than entire paragraphs from lesser crime writers. Mann’s gift for macho detail loses nothing from screen to page—of course, Chris is listening to Bon Jovi while driving Charlene out of Las Vegas; probably “Wanted Dead or Alive,” right? There are so many times when Heat 2 evokes that hyper-masculine, stylish, strikingly beautiful visual aesthetic that Mann has created on film that it’s a must-read for fans of his work just to watch the lost film that it conjures in your mind.

It may not be lost for long. Mann has already said that he plans to make Heat 2 into a film, and recasting Pacino, De Niro, and Kilmer will be only one of the problems. This book plays more like a TV series or trilogy of films than a standalone feature. It’s hard to see how he could wrangle all of these characters and timelines into one coherent movie. Although Mann has been building out the back stories for these people for decades—the book reportedly comes from that process on the original film—so maybe he knows how to pick and choose what parts of Heat 2 to adapt, leaving the rest just for fans of the novel. I can’t wait to find out.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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'Heat 2': Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner's sequel is a must-read for fans of the film

"Heat 2" (William Morrow, 480 pp., ★★★ out of four) – both prequel and sequel to Michael Mann ’s iconic 1995 film starring Al Pacino as LAPD Lt. Vincent Hanna and Robert De Niro as violent professional thief Neil McCauley – is sort of an odd bird.

When was the last time one of cinema’s great auteurs decided that instead of filming a sequel to a movie (that, frankly, did not call out for a sequel in any form), opted instead to write a novel? It seems like a recipe for disaster. Mann wisely brought in Edgar Award-winning author Meg Gardiner as his co-writer and the partnership resulted in a novel that is both obviously Mann’s – entirely overlong, filled with ready-to-shoot atmospheric touches and over-the-top violence – and obviously Gardiner’s – lean dialogue that moves like a bullet, clever use of setting and perfect scene setup.

The novel is in sure hands.  

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Still, if you’ve seen "Heat," you already know the big plot point that makes a sequel seem superfluous: McCauley, the boss of a violent team of professional thieves, is killed by Hanna at the end of the movie, along with most of his crew, save for Chris Shiherlis (played by Val Kilmer , at the height of his powers), who now must go on the run. If you haven’t seen "Heat," the balance of the film is recounted in the book’s prologue, which is helpful, if dry.

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The novel then toggles between both Hanna and McCauley’s origin stories in the late 1980s in Chicago and, eventually, along the Mexican border, where the men dance toward each other in the space of three different crimes: a violent and sexually sadistic home invasion and a botched home invasion, both being investigated by Hanna, and a frankly brilliant bank vault heist headlined by McCauley. It’s here some of Mann and Gardiner’s best work happens as the two men circle unseen, only their edges meeting. But we see it, and it’s thrilling.

The novel then jumps forward to follow Shiherlis as he attempts to carve out his own niche in South America after the events of "Heat," before eventually returning to LA in 2000 in hopes of exacting revenge on Hanna. Shiherlis lacks the noirish charm and wit, plus casual menace, that Hanna and McCauley possess. In the film, Kilmer was able to imbue the character with more depth than he has here, simply by flashing a smile, because the actor’s warmth is hard to hide, which makes his ability to do bad, bad things more fun to see. On the page, he’s too casually drawn, his emotional core too base. He’s a second banana forced into a role too large for him.

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That McCauley is both dead and alive presents the authors with a unique problem: How to wrest drama out of scenes meant to be life and death? They respond by turning McCauley’s backstory into an exploration of his code – he’s always willing to leave everything behind within 30 seconds if he feels the heat around the corner – which makes his sections instructional, but also captivating in terms of character development. The same can be said for Hanna’s early sections. He’s obsessed when we met him in "Heat" because the job requires nothing less, even if that means taking a bump of coke to stay up to do the job.

"Heat 2" is a must for fans of the film – it’s a perverse joy to spend time in Hanna and McCauley’s heads – and fans of Gardiner’s will find her stretching muscles you might not know she had. For fans of Mann’s, well, he says now he’s going to make this a movie, too.        

Review: Heat 2 by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner

When HEAT 2 picks up, following a brief recap of the film’s events, Mann initially follows Shiherlis in the aftermath of Heat’s climactic showdown. With Hanna still on the hunt for him, Shiherlis lands in South America and starts a new life with a new crew. Meanwhile, we’re transported back to the late 1980s, when Shiherlis was last south of the border. In that period, a younger McCauley is preparing a job in Chicago, while Hanna is on the hunt for different crew with a sadistic home invasion modus operandi .

It’s here that the new story really cooks. Without the burdens of following such an epic story, ’80s Chicago takes on the backbone of the story and is vividly realised as ’90s Los Angeles. You can almost hear Pacino’s voice in the cracking dialogue, fired at a rapid pace as the narrative rolls and shifts with the punches. The setting is a very deliberate choice on Mann’s part: as a native Chicagoan, this part of the story thematically ties HEAT 2 as much to Thief as it does L.A. Takedown and Heat .

With a laser focus on this handful of characters, and an economy of language that matches contemporary thrillers, most of the individual set-pieces rip along at a pace — even at close to 500 pages. Yet there it doesn’t have the same cohesiveness of the singular plotting of its predecessor, taking more of a scattergun approach. The divergent and non-linear threads rely on coincidence, especially as the plot moves into 2000. Apart from a few action sequences, admittedly staged with the craft of a master, it just never feels like a whole entity.

There will be a lot of rhetoric that compares HEAT 2 to a Mann film. This is unsurprising given the source. Yet what this argument misses is that film and text are very different mediums, and the grafting of one onto the other might explain some of the scattered approach across the story. It’s still a good yarn, perhaps with the makings of a great film.

As of July 2022, Mann has still been talking about making that film , albeit with a different cast. “It’s kind of a  Heat  universe, in a way,” he told Empire. “And that certainly justifies a very large ambitious movie.” In the meantime, this book is sure to scratch an itch — or it might just send you in the direction of a rewatch. Either way, it all goes to prove that there’s a spark in Heat almost three decades after its release.

2022 | US | WRITERS: Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner | PUBLISHER: William Morrow & Company (US), HarperCollins (Australia) | LENGTH: 480 pages | RELEASE DATE: 9 August 2022 (US), 18 August 2022 (Australia)

About The Author

Richard Gray

Editor of TheReelBits . You can see Richard's unfiltered train of thought on Twitter @DVDBits . His complete film diary is on Letterboxd . Richard's book, Moving Target: The History and Evolution of Green Arrow is out now from Sequart .

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The Big Picture

• Heat 2 expands on the world and characters of the iconic film with a globetrotting narrative that takes place in Mexico, Paraguay, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
• The novel delves deeper into the personalities of Vincent Hanna, Neil McCauley, and Chris Shiherlis, showcasing their personal growth and motivations through thrilling events.
• Michael Mann and co-writer Meg Gardiner collaborated extensively to bring the story to life, breathing new life into the "Heat" universe and leaving the possibility of a big-screen adaptation.

Michael Mann 's Heat is one of cinema's most beloved crime films. Aside from famously having Al Pacino and Robert De Niro officially share the screen for the first time , it remains a shining example of three-dimensional characters, complex narrative themes, and thrilling action set against a vast urban backdrop. But the legendary exploits of detective Vincent Hanna (Pacino), career thief Neil McCauley (De Niro), and Chris Shiherlis ( Val Kilmer ) would live on beyond Heat 's dramatic conclusion at the Los Angeles airport. 27 years later, working alongside fellow writer Meg Gardiner , Mann undertook his first major literary endeavor and co-wrote Heat 2 , which serves as both a prequel and sequel to his iconic film and greatly expands on its source material. Featuring several familiar faces alongside new allies and villains, Mann's novel more than succeeds in giving readers an adrenaline-fueled ride complete with detailed insight into the world and characters he laid the foundation for in 1995.

A group of high-end professional thieves start to feel the heat from the LAPD when they unknowingly leave a verbal clue at their latest heist.

What is 'Heat 2' About?

Heat 2 is globetrotting, action-packed storytelling at its finest. Employing a non-linear structure that takes place in 1988, 1995, 1996, and 2000, the novel kicks off in the immediate aftermath of its predecessor. A badly wounded bank robber on the run, Chris Shiherlis narrowly escapes authorities and flees to Mexico. Supplied with funds and a new identity courtesy of Nate (played by Jon Voight in the film), the L.A. fugitive makes his way to Ciudad del Este in Paraguay, the largest city within the Triple Frontier region of South America. As he soon discovers, Ciudad del Este is the Wild West, a playground catering to all manner of organized crime, both old school and modern. He forms partnerships with a handful of characters that lead him to the company of two rival Taiwanese families, the Lius and the Chens, as they compete for control over markets involving the latest in high-tech electronics and other products. After falling for Ana—a key player in the Liu family—Chris finds himself treading on thin ice as tensions between the dynasty families rise to a fever pitch.

Cut to 1988. Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley are living in Chicago. Existing on parallel tracks but oblivious to each other's existence, the future foes are at the top of their respective games in law enforcement and theft. But what binds their fates and sees them nearly cross paths in the Windy City is the violent criminal Otis Wardell. Possessing a penchant for sinister theatrics and torture, Wardell rivals Heat 's Waingro ( Kevin Gage ) as the story's premier psychopath running amok. The novel's Chicago portion arguably belongs to Hanna , whose trademark obsessive and meticulous methods have him hot on the killer's tail after a brutal home invasion. On the other side of the law, McCauley, always the calculated professional in his own right, busies himself with a robbery that ultimately yields precious information regarding a potential takedown elsewhere.

After Hanna nearly apprehends Wardell and McCauley barely avoids the criminal's sadistic ways, both men leave Chicago and readers follow McCauley to the US-Mexican border. Along with his familiar crew including Chris and Michael Cherrito (played by Tom Sizemore in the film), Neil's in the company of his girlfriend, Elisa, and her daughter, Gabriella. Based on the information they stumbled on during their Chicago score, the men prepare for what may be their most ambitious and dangerous heist yet: ripping off a Mexican cartel's stash house. While the score itself goes down successfully, Neil pays a high price when the vicious Wardell, having followed the men to the border, kidnaps Elisa in the hopes of making out with the crew's take.

12 years later, the action pivots to Los Angeles. Five years after the events of Heat , Vincent Hanna is on the prowl for the killer of a young woman, and the nature of her murder reminds the detective of a particularly grisly criminal from Chicago in 1988. As fate would have it, Otis Wardell has come to L.A., and Hanna's hellbent on getting his man this time. And as if the world weren't already small enough, Elisa's daughter Gabriella—now an adult—is also in the city and proves essential in Hanna's search for Wardell. At the same time, Chris has traveled from Paraguay to L.A. for business and has his own plans for the man who killed his brother in crime five years before. With all these characters and subplots converging, Heat 2 arrives at an explosive, utterly white-knuckle conclusion. Imagine the downtown shootout in Heat if it were to play out on the city's 105 highway.

What Does The Novel Reveal About The Characters In The Film?

Aside from the pulse-pounding action and thrills one would expect from a sequel novel to Mann's film, Heat 2 is also an exercise in character building, adding to and layering the already three-dimensional individuals we first met on screen in 1995. While Vincent Hanna navigates the novel's 1988 chapters with his trademark ax-to-grind and crass, fast-talking nature, his experience of tracking the ruthless Otis Wardell in Chicago finds him taken aback by the often perplexing nature of such violent people and crimes , ultimately leading him down a professional road that blurs moral lines in pursuit of vigilante justice. It's no wonder that one day he'd tell his wife, "All I am is who I'm going after."

Likewise, Heat 2 establishes a predicate of significant change for Neil McCauley. In the novel, though always the consummate thief, he's a man seemingly unafraid of personal attachment, possessing deep affection for his girlfriend and her daughter. After a series of dramatic events on the US-Mexico border, however, his life is forever altered, and he soon adopts the signature mantra he espouses in the film: "Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner."

Chris Shiherlis arguably undergoes the most significant arc of the novel's three main characters. Prior to the events of Heat, he was largely at the service of something greater than himself as a member of a crew, a cog in the wheel. After escaping L.A., and forging a new path in Paraguay and the greater realm of international vice, he takes on a newfound level of independence and vision, making moves without hesitation and taking full control of his destiny as a criminal mastermind. By the novel's end, Chris is more assured and determined than ever before, no longer relegated to the sidelines of decision-making and relying on no one other than himself.

How Did 'Heat 2' Happen?

Speaking about the desire to return to the richly dense world he created, Michael Mann told Rolling Stone , " I never really left them, and they never really left me." The filmmaker, well-known for performing exhaustive research when undertaking a project, wrote detailed backstories for his characters in preparation for making Heat . Despite having all that material, however, Mann wanted a fresh set of eyes to collaborate with, and he found them in novelist Meg Gardiner . Regarding the proposition of working with a filmmaker and writer she admired, Gardiner said, "I'd always wanted to write a heist novel. What better chance to do that than with these characters, in that world?!"

The two writers soon went to work, and Mann shared with Gardiner the extensive information and references he'd compiled decades before for his film. "I wanted to bring her into the Heat universe--because it really is a universe. So I kind of dropped Meg into the deep end of the pool with that stuff," he's said of the process. Gardiner remembers, "he was moving into a new arena, and I think he wanted to work with an experienced novelist on this--specifically, a crime novelist. He already had the arc of the story, though. I think he'd been thinking about this for decades."

Much of the work between the duo was done remotely, exchanging emails and Word documents from halfway around the globe. While Mann was largely responsible for the novel's overall structure, he and Gardiner didn't simply divide the workload, but often wrote concurrently, revising, polishing, and adding to one another's material. Mann said of the collaboration, "I'd be stuck on something and say, 'Look, I've been on these three pages for two days now. Can you take a crack at this?' and vice versa." It wouldn't be until after working remotely for a year that they would first sit down face-to-face in Los Angeles. Gardiner said of finally meeting her writing partner, "I got my own Vincent-Neil coffee shop scene with him!"

Book Review:  “Heat 2” by Michael Mann + Meg Gardiner

This article discusses plot details and scene specifics from Michael Mann’s film Heat (1995) and his novel Heat 2 (2022).

John Carpenter’s dystopian classic Escape from New York (1981), set in 1997, opens with an expository intertitle:  “1988—The Crime Rate in the United States Rises Four Hundred Percent.”  Though that grim prognostication amounted to an exaggeration, the issue itself had nonetheless become a big deal here in the real world by the early 1990s:

In 1993, the year President Clinton took office, violent crime struck nearly 11 million Americans , and an additional 32 million suffered thefts or burglaries.  These staggering numbers put millions more in fear.  They also choked the economic vitality out of entire neighborhoods. Politically, crime had become one of the most divisive issues in the country.  Republicans called for an ever more punitive “war on drugs,” while many Democrats offered little beyond nebulous calls to eliminate the “root causes” of crime. David Yassky, “Unlocking the Truth About the Clinton Crime Bill,” Opinion, New York Times , April 9, 2016

Clinton’s response was the measurably effective (if still controversial) Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, otherwise known as the 1994 Crime Bill, coauthored by Joe Biden, the provisions of which—and this is just a sampling—added fifty new federal offenses, expanded capital punishment, led to the establishment of state sex-offender registries, and included the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (since expired) and the Violence Against Women Act.

It was an attempt to address a big issue in America at the time:  Crime, particularly violent crime, had been rising for decades, starting in the 1960s but continuing, on and off, through the 1990s (in part due to the crack cocaine epidemic). Politically, the legislation was also a chance for Democrats—including the recently elected president, Bill Clinton—to wrestle the issue of crime away from Republicans.   Polling suggested Americans were very concerned about high crime back then.  And especially after George H.W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election in part by painting Dukakis as “soft on crime,” Democrats were acutely worried that Republicans were beating them on the issue. German Lopez, “The controversial 1994 crime law that Joe Biden helped write, explained,” Vox , September 29, 2020

Given the sociopolitical conditions of the era, it stands to reason—hell, it seems so obvious in hindsight—the 1990s would be a golden age of neo- noir crime cinema.  The death of Michael Corleone, as it happens, signified a rebirth of the genre itself; Martin Scorsese countered the elegiac lethargy—that’s not a criticism—of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part III with the coke-fueled kineticism of Goodfellas (both 1990).  Henry Hill shared none of Michael’s nagging reluctance about life in the Italian Mafia; he always wanted to be a gangster!

Reasoning that was probably true of audiences, too—as an author of horror stories, I certainly appreciate a healthy curiosity for the dark side—Hollywood offered vicarious trips into the criminal underworlds of Hell’s Kitchen, in Phil Joanou’s State of Grace (1990), and Harlem, in Mario Van Peebles’ New Jack City (1991), both of which feature undercover cops as major characters.  So does Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992), about a police officer (Laurence Fishburne) posing as an L.A. drug dealer as part of a broader West Coast sting operation.

The line between cop and criminal, so clearly drawn in the action-comedies of the previous decade ( Lethal Weapon , Beverly Hills Cop , Stakeout , Running Scared ), was becoming subject to greater ambiguity.  In no movie is that made more starkly apparent than Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992), about a corrupt, hedonistic, drug-addicted, gambling-indebted, intentionally nameless New York cop (Harvey Keitel) investigating the rape of a nun in the vain hope it will somehow redeem his pervasive rottenness.

And it wasn’t merely that new stories were being told; this is Hollywood, after all, so we have some remakes in the mix.  Classic crime thrillers were given contemporary makeovers, like Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), as well as Barbet Schroeder’s Kiss of Death (1995), which is mostly remembered, to the extent it’s remembered at all, as the beginning and end of David Caruso’s would-be movie career, but which is much better than its reputation, thanks in no small part to a sharp script by Richard Price ( Clockers ), full of memorably colorful Queens characters and his signature street-smart dialogue.

Creative experimentation was in full swing, too, as neo- noir films incorporated conventions of other genres, including erotic thriller (Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct [1992]), black comedy (the Coen brothers’ Fargo [1996] and The Big Lebowski [1998]), period throwback (Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress [1995]; Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential [1997]), neo-Western (James Mangold’s Cop Land [1997]), and, well, total coffee-cup-shattering, head-in-a-box mindfuckery (Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects ; David Fincher’s Seven [both 1995]).

Christ, at that point, Quentin Tarantino practically became a subgenre unto himself after the one-two punch of Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), which in turn inspired an incessant succession of self-consciously “clever” knockoffs like John Herzfeld’s 2 Days in the Valley (1996) and Gary Fleder’s Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995).  By the mid-’90s, the crime rate, at least at the cinema, sure seemed like it had risen by 400%.

As different as they all are, those films can almost unanimously be viewed as a repudiation of the ethos of ’80s action movies, in which there were objectively good guys, like John McClane, in conflict with objectively bad guys, like Hans Gruber, in a zero-sum battle for justice, for victory.  It was all very simple and reassuring, in keeping with the archconservative, righteous-cowboy worldview of Ronald Reagan.  And while those kinds of movies continued to find a receptive audience—look no further than the Die Hard –industrial complex, which begat Under Siege (1992) and Cliffhanger (1993) and Speed (1994), among scores of others—filmmakers were increasingly opting for multilayered antiheroes over white hats versus black hats.

Which begged the question:  Given how blurred the lines had become between good guys and bad guys in crime cinema, could you ever go back to telling an earnest, old-school cops-and-robbers story—one with an unequivocally virtuous protagonist and nefarious antagonist—that nonetheless aspired to be something more dramatically credible, more psychologically nuanced, more thematically layered than a Steven Seagal star vehicle?

Enter Michael Mann’s Heat .

After the nonlinear narrativity of The Usual Suspects and Tarantino, the plot of Heat is refreshingly straightforward:  Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) leads a crew of highline thieves pulling off heists—or “taking down scores,” in the movie’s parlance—across Los Angeles; LAPD Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) is the dogged detective on their trail.  For the entirety of its nearly three-hour runtime, the movie has you rooting simultaneously for McCauley to get away and for Hanna to catch him in the act.

The fictional story was loosely inspired by the real-life experiences of Chicago police detective Chuck Adamson, who tracked and killed a thief by the actual name of Neil McCauley in 1964.  Adamson, as well as career criminal Edward Bunker (the model for Jon Voight’s character, Nate) served as technical consultants on Heat .  As such, Mann’s attention to procedural detail, along with his commitment to psychological verisimilitude, resulted in a cinematic epic that unfolds with novelistic patience, establishing each character in his or her dramatic status quo—mostly his (more on that point later)—meticulously setting the chessboard before drawing the game pieces into one another’s circles.

This is the kind of story that wouldn’t even be attempted as a feature film today, and not because there’s no longer an audience for non-superhero cinema or the near-total obsolescence of movie stars , but rather owed to Heat ’s ambitious narrative scope; a project like this would be conceived and developed as a limited series of eight or ten episodes for HBO Max or Netflix.  But to watch Heat now, in our age of streaming content that’s gone all-in on the structurally questionable “ten-hour movie” model of televisional narrativity, is to remember what once upon a time constituted good storytelling :  the ability to draw audiences into a fictional scenario and keep them there —not with the promise of yet more open-ended worldbuilding, but with the boon of catharsis , the finality of decisive resolution.

We the audience agree to submit to a short-term state of tension in return for the storyteller’s assurance of climax and release—a point to the story, aside from its own endless self-perpetuation .  A filmmaker cannot hold an audience in stifled-breath suspense when the narrative arc is interrupted nine times over ten episodes, hence the reason Monster in the House movies such as The Exorcist and The Omen and Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer all failed creatively (and commercially) in their relatively recent transitions to the episodic format of the small screen.

The masterful storytelling of Heat is a welcome reminder that often a long movie is preferable to a short television series.  Heat feels BIG , not bloated, in contrast with so much of our so-called “prestige” TV , which “almost always sacrifices good storytelling now for the perceived benefit of good storytelling later, and too often results in neither coming true” (Kathryn VanArendonk, “Why Are We So Sure ‘Prestige’ TV Looks Like a 10-Hour Movie?” , Trends, Vulture , March 28, 2017).

Heat is a grand-scale cops-and-robbers saga told on a broad canvas, but one in which no detail, no matter how granular, is irrelevant.  “There’s a design at work in all art,” Tom Stoppard wrote in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1966).  “Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion.”  Hanna and McCauley, the two most regimented men in their respective professions, move through the plot turns of Heat on a collision course.  At the climactic moment, one of them falters in his discipline—at the cost of his life—and one of them doesn’t—at the cost of his marriage—and the story reaches its inexorable dénouement:

It ends the only way it can end, with two of the toughest men in Los Angeles holding hands as one of them bleeds out on the periphery of LAX’s tarmac.  For the greater part of two and a half hours, we’ve watched Neil McCauley—mastermind of heists and bank robberies—and Vincent Hanna—lieutenant in the LAPD’s Major Crimes Unit—circle one another, chase each other, and calmly converse over a cup of coffee.  Now, however, these apex predators of the urban jungle have reached their endgame, and this cop and this criminal share one final moment together before McCauley shuffles off this mortal coil.  The fact that they are played by Robert De Niro and Al Pacino only sweetens the deal. This is where we leave the twin anti-heroes of Heat , Michael Mann’s epic 1995 crime thriller, right before the final credits roll.  It’s the perfect fade-out of a film devoted to the sort of game-recognizes-game professionalism and Zen machismo that the writer-director traffics in . . . steeped in a sense of authenticity regarding what these men do and who they are—as if, in Mann’s universe, there is any difference between the two.  “McCauley is passing out of existence, [while] in contact with the only other person who truly understands him,” the filmmaker says, nodding to himself as he recalls the image over a Zoom call.  “And ironically, that’s also the person who killed him. “It’s the last moment of Heat ,” Mann adds.  “But it’s really the first moment of Heat .  It’s when that ending occurred to me that I thought, ‘Ok, I could make this movie.’” David Fear, “‘Heat 2’:  Why Michael Mann’s Sequel to His Classic Crime-Movie Had to Be a Novel,” Rolling Stone , August 7, 2022

On the subject of germinal moments, Heat has special significance in my life, as it is the movie my wife and I saw on our first date , on Third Avenue at East 86 th Street, as college sophomores.  I distinctly recall the other feature playing at the cineplex that day was the long-since-forgotten Sandra Bullock/Denis Leary romcom Two If by Sea (1996).  Few films, and few relationships, have staying power; most are ephemeral.  It isn’t lost on me that Heat , culturally resonant as it’s been and relevant as it remains, beat the odds.  So did we .

Revisiting Heat over a quarter century later, it is also apparent that it’s so much more than merely an enduring masterpiece; it’s a cinematic mic drop.  Heat is to crime operas what Jaws is to shark movies—a never-to-be-bested pinnacle of the genre.  Any policier produced after 1995 would exist in the long shadow cast by Mann’s magnum opus.  Mangold’s Cop Land is, deservedly, a cult classic—Sylvester Stallone, cast against type as a schlubby Jersey sheriff, gives the performance of his career among an all-star ensemble including Keitel and De Niro—but I can’t help but think it would occupy a far loftier position in the pantheon of crime dramas had it been produced only a few years earlier.

So, having permanently spoiled the cops-and-robbers genre for all future entries, and having reached an utterly satisfying aesthetic, moral, and logical conclusion, I can’t say I’ve ever nursed a desire for—or even so much as entertained a fleeting thought of—a Heat sequel.  What would’ve been left to do, after all, save put Hanna on another case, against an inevitably less-compelling adversary?

Besides which, Pacino has long since aged out of the part, and I no more want him to reprise that role than I care to see Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones again or Eddie Murphy in another Beverly Hills Cop .  On balance, I find the entire premise of so-called “legacy sequels” utterly depressing:  They are less about exploring how beloved characters have changed with age— Creed (2015) and Creed II (2018), which honor the best of the Rocky movies and even somehow redeem the worst of them, are rare instances of a franchise revival done right—than they are about reassuring their audiences absolutely nothing has changed, right down to the fucking wardrobe:

So, with half the characters dead, and the actors who portrayed the surviving characters too old to reprise their roles, to say nothing of a bow-tied conclusion that doesn’t leave you wanting more—in the best possible way—how would one even begin to creatively approach a follow-up to Heat …?

You’d switch the medium.  Heat 2 is Mann’s first novel, and though he had help writing it (with Edgar Award–winning thriller author Meg Gardiner ), it very much evinces his singular voice and style.  If Heat was uncommonly novelistic in its narrative structure, it’s fitting Heat 2 should be so stylistically cinematic.  Though not formatted like a screenplay, Heat 2 is very much written like one:  Clipped prose, more suggestive than descriptive—mostly effective, occasionally superficial.  Action unfolds in present tense , lending the story an undercurrent of urgency as pervasively, surreptitiously oppressive as the stagnant air of sunbaked SoCal.  Mann’s economical composition reflects the same no-nonsense, minimalist discipline of his hyperfocused lawman and outlaw.

Spanning the years 1988 through 2000, Heat 2 takes a Godfather, Part II –style approach to its storytelling, operating as an intercutting prequel and sequel to Heat , its nonlinear narrative presented in six parts:

• Part One is set in Los Angeles of 1995 during the immediate aftermath of the movie, detailing Hanna’s time-sensitive efforts to find and arrest the single surviving member of McCauley’s crew, Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), before he can skip town.  But it’s too late:  Nate (Voight) has already arranged to smuggle Chris to South America via Mexico, his freedom secured—but without much hope he’ll ever see his wife and son again.
• Part Two winds back the clock to 1988 to depict the whirlwind Las Vegas romance of Chris and Charlene (Ashley Judd), a prostitute sans prospects at that point in her life.  Chris soon joins McCauley and Michael Cerrito (Tom Sizemore) in Chicago, where the crew pulls off a safety-deposit vault heist that yields an unexpected boon:  a cache of shipment logs detailing the precise highway routes by which a notorious drug cartel moves its money from the U.S. to a stash house in Mexico.  Meanwhile, Hanna and Casals (Wes Studi)—Chicago cops at this point in their careers, years before they would cross paths with McCauley’s crew—are investigating a series of violent home invasions in the Gold Coast Historic District perpetrated by a sadistic psychopath.
• Part Three takes us to Paraguay of 1996, where Chris works security detail—he’s a glorified chauffeur—for a Taiwanese crime syndicate exploiting one of the country’s free-trade zones.  (You get the gist of what this criminal enterprise is up to even if it’s a lot to comprehend, and I say this having read the book twice.)  With strategic patience, Chris demonstrates his substantial value to the family and earns their trust, working his way up the organization’s ladder, all in service to his personal endgame:  to establish himself as a key player on the global criminal stage, with the clout and resources to get Charlene and Dominick out of the United States for good.
• Part Four brings us down to the Mexican border in 1988, shortly after the Chicago score, for an absolutely thrilling heist sequence—as edge-of-seat intense as the movie’s Downtown L.A. bank robbery—in which McCauley’s crew plans and executes a takedown of the cartel cash depot.  I could barely breathe through this entire section, one of the most suspenseful action sequences I’ve ever read in any book or script.
• Part Five returns us to Paraguay of ’96, developing Chris’ alliance—and dalliance—with the Taiwanese crime family’s industrious-yet-sidelined daughter, Ana.
• Up until this point—326 pages into a 466-page novel— Heat 2 has mostly been a series of entertaining if essentially unrelated vignettes, and were it not for the goodwill these characters, and Mann himself, engendered in the audience through the movie, the disjointed narrative presented here would’ve probably tried the patience of even the most forgiving reader.  And yet in Part Six , which moves the story forward in time to 2000, back to the city where this saga began, Los Angeles, Mann and Gardiner tie all the plotlines together in supremely satisfying fashion… even if they do rely on some coincidence-heavy plotting to pull it off.

But, then, it is the very nature of coincidence, of causality, that is the central thematic concern of Heat 2 :  how events connect and lives intersect, even in ways we can never see, know, or appreciate.  There is, as Stoppard instructs, a design at work in narrativity , and that is certainly true of Heat 2 ; Mann establishes his thesis early in the novel, when Neil gets his nose out of joint over an encounter with a hardware vendor who arrives late with a delivery, only to then make unsolicited small talk about what the crew plans to do, exactly, with all those circular saws and prybars…?

Chris and Cerrito load the gear the supplier brought.  Neil jumps in one of the work cars and fires up the engine.  Chris hops into the passenger seat.  He says nothing.  They pull out with Cerrito and Molina in the other vehicles behind them.  Neil is still breathing hard. “Motherfucker…” he says to himself. Chris turns to him.  “Let it go.  He’s nobody.” Neil looks over.  “Yeah?” From the way Neil grips the wheel, Chris knows he’s not letting it go. “It was a random thing,” Chris says. “Random?  Like the guy who saved pennies I knew once.  ‘What the fuck are you saving pennies for?’ I asked.  ‘’Cause a hundred of ’em makes a dollar,’ he said.  Some anonymous asshole sees you and mentions something to somebody who talks to somebody else, which gets overheard, and you wind up being jackpotted, and ‘Where the fuck did that come from?’  It’s invisible but it’s operating all around you.  Little strings of micro cause and effect.  You can’t see’ em, but they’re there.  ‘Oh!  I had bad luck.’  Bullshit.  It’s for real. . . .” Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner, Heat 2 (New York:  HarperCollins Publishers, 2022), 73–74

Neil concerns himself with these matters out of a sense of sociopathic self-preservation, but across town, Hanna, a detective of preternatural empathy, reflects in his own way on those little strings of micro cause-and-effect a mere two pages later:

“I had a Korean girl get shot, once.  At random.  No reason.  Freeway sniper.  He could have shot the next car.  Through the windshield.  She’s riding in the back seat.  Shot in the head.  She was in a coma for a long time.  Family came apart.  A year later her father’s an alcoholic, loses his job, parents divorce.  The younger brother starts setting fires.  Multiple lives screwed up forever.  That’s what can happen.” ibid., 76

Skirting unawares along the edges of one another’s orbits, neither Hanna nor McCauley realize at that moment, of course, that the cosmic connective tissue they both recognize so sagaciously will one day put them in professional—and ideological—confrontation with one another.  But we do.  Such is the appeal of a prequel for an audience—the godlike thrill of storyworld omniscience—but also the tricky creative challenge for the storyteller.  Backstory supplies cause ; story dramatizes effect .  Backstory is to a narrative what gasoline is to an automobile:  the ulterior fuel that makes the engine function, propelling the entity to its ultimate destination.  You only need just enough , hence the reason most prequels are more-is-less exercises in narrative inevitability.

At their worst, their most crassly commercial , prequels exist to reconcile continuity inconsistencies (and usually just create new ones in the process), to needlessly expound on summary backstory (the fall of the Old Republic in Revenge of the Sith ; the Budapest Operation in Black Widow ), to provide backstory for the backstory ( Andor ; The Acolyte ), to fill in purposeful narrative gaps misinterpreted as plot holes (Superman’s young adulthood as dramatized, interminably, on Smallville ; Ben’s years in self-exile on Tatooine on Obi-Wan Kenobi ), to show familiar characters meeting for the first time strictly for the audience’s voyeuristic delight ( Star Trek:  Strange New Worlds ), to elaborate unnecessarily on intentionally enigmatic visual details (the “space jockey” from Ridley Scott’s Alien and Prometheus ), to meticulously explain every offhanded allusion (the Kessel Run in Solo and… just about everything else in Solo )—all so the dutiful superfan can maintain a coherent theory of everything .

This is what’s known as point-and-clap entertainment .  It’s meaningless—an Easter-egg hunt masquerading as narrativity, a continuity scorecard presented in place of a cathartic story .  The scrupulous collection and collation of the floating facts across an intertextual narrative (such as the “universes” of Star Wars and the MCU) turns storytelling into an exercise in puzzle-solving , as if seeing the “whole picture”—a fool’s errand in its own right, given the open-ended expansion of these corporate franchises—will provide the perspective necessary to understand the rhyme and reason for, the cause and effect of, everything in the sprawling storyworld.  Because by making sense of the fiction, we make meaning of the “random” events that occur within it, an epiphany seldom if ever attained in real life.

While Mann takes care to connect some dots—Neil’s idiosyncratic fascination with Fiji’s iridescent algae, for example, is one of many small details given contextual illumination, however unnecessarily, in Heat 2 —it doesn’t stink of cheap fan service .  Such moments are arguably less a commercial indulgence than an artistic one, instances of the type of existential rumination we’ve long come to expect from the introspective professionals who inhabit Mann’s stories.  His preeminently self-aware lead characters aren’t in search of meaning; they take meaning from what they do and who they are—from their sense of self-purpose.  Consider Hanna, for starters:

Back when he was twelve in Granite City, Illinois, floating on his back in a lake, looking up into the night sky and constellations, he all at once understood that we are an accident of happenstance on a speck of dust in a blink of time in the big nothing.  It didn’t fill him with meaninglessness.  It made him feel consciousness was a rare and recent temporary accident.  And that meant life is about what you did with it right now.  It infused him with ambition. ibid., 78

McCauley espouses a similar understanding of existence in a conversation with his girlfriend, Elisa:

“We’re here now.  No big reason we exist.  No purpose.  No heaven or hell waiting on how we pray.  The only real question is, why keep on living?  Is life worth it?  Why not just kill yourself?  The only judgment is how we use the now.” “I don’t want to put an end to it.  If this is what we have, better live it.” “Yeah.  All we have is this moment.  We live it, conscious of what it means.  Nothing.  But completely live it.  That’s what it is.” ibid., 242

One of key components of Neil McCauley’s psychology, established in the movie, that Mann excavates in the novel is the dogma from which his saga draws its title:  “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.”  The ill-gotten gains—the drug-cartel money—from Neil’s previous ill-gotten gains—the shipment logs acquired during the safe-deposit score—lead directly and unambiguously to the violent death of Elisa.  In her final moments of life, Neil acknowledges his culpability in what’s happened:

He fights it for another moment, clutching tight to the world he’s in, to the world he wants, the one that’s about to disappear.  Because of his actions.  Because of the things he has brought upon this broken glory who lies here on the road. ibid., 306

Neil is fully fucking aware he invited this tragedy into his life by choosing to rip off the bank in Chicago, and subsequently choosing to steal from the cartel in Mexico.  (And on the subject of cause-and-consequence, the stolen stash-house money winds up unintentionally funding a shitload of monstrously evil activity in the final section of Heat 2 , because one bad deed begets another in Mann’s world.)  Yet when we meet Neil again seven years later, during the events of the movie, how have these events changed him?  Have they inspired him to stop stealing—to stop doing bad things that lead to yet other bad things?

No—he’s simply more disciplined about keeping personal relationships at arm’s length .  Neil has no interest in changing who he is—in aspiring to be better.

Neither, for that matter, does our hero Hanna.  When we join him again in 2000, he’s been drained of so much of his popeyed piss ’n’ vinegar, long-divorced from Justine (Diane Venora), who will no longer speak to him, desperate to avoid “his report-fucked office” (ibid., 334), and subsisting on a steady diet of Adderall just to keep his legs pumping.  Even his faithful sidekick Drucker (Mykelti Williamson) is growing impatient with having to cover for him.

It didn’t have to come to that, though.  Someone who once loved Hanna—someone less important to him, ultimately, than Neil McCauley—tried to get him to see the light:

The very last thing [Justine] told him was:  Speed won’t give you the power to track your prey in the dark.  That glow you feel?  It isn’t x-ray vision.  It’s self-incineration.  Understand?   And the door shut in his face. ibid., 336

Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley are alpha males who make no apologies for being what they are, who live comfortably in their skin—just like some seasoned action hero still inexplicably garbed in the same jacket he’s been wearing since the ’80s—and who refuse to be changed by any loving appeal or, worse, tragic consequence from a choice they’ve made.  They don’t give a fuck.  All the self-awareness in the world doesn’t inspire a moment’s humility in either of them.  Both men are slaves to their egos and perfectly content to remain so for all eternity.  They explicitly admit as much to one another in the celebrated coffee-shop scene from the film, after McCauley tells Hanna his girlfriend (Amy Brenneman) labors under the false impression he’s a salesman:

HANNA:   So, then, if you spot me coming around that corner, you’re just gonna walk out on this woman?  Not say goodbye? McCAULEY:   That’s the discipline. HANNA:   That’s pretty vacant, no? McCAULEY:   Yeah, it is what it is.  It’s that or we both better go do something else, pal. HANNA:   I don’t know how to do anything else. McCAULEY:   Neither do I. HANNA:   I don’t much want to, either. McCAULEY:   Neither do I. From Heat , written by Michael Mann

Mm-hmm .  Because for all its procedural authenticity, for all the real-life cops and criminals who acted as creative consultants on the project, Heat is less concerned with criminality then it appears; Mann’s real fascination, true to his surname, is masculinity .  To that point, there are only three women of significance in Heat 2 , two of whom—Elisa and Gabriela—are textbook damsels-in-distress; their sole narrative function is to compel the men into violent conflict with one another, into “heroic” action.

The third female of consequence, Ana Liu, struggles, despite her keen intelligence and ambition, to make appreciable headway against the patriarchal hierarchy and cultural traditions of her Chinese crime family, until Chris’ partnership and resources—including a helping hand from his old L.A. contacts Nate and cybercriminal Kelso (Tom Noonan)—allow for the independence she could never quite realize on her own.

Hell, up till then, Ana is perfectly at ease with being Chris’ consolation prize—someone to keep his bed warm till he can reunite with Charlene.  She demonstrates infinite patience as Chris wrestles with the choice to return to his family or stay with her.  In the end, Ana simply replaces Charlene, much the way Carolina (Salma Hayek) is Mariachi’s (Antonio Banderas) explicit compensation for the violent death of Dominó (Consuelo Gómez) in Desperado (1995).  She is Chris’ reward for being willing, in contrast with his mentor McCauley, to change with the times:

The Lius do deals; access supplies, finished goods, hardware and components, available supply chains; make bank transactions through global electronic funds transfers.  They have access to government databases in Russia and Israel for intel on customers and any law enforcement that may impede them.  They mostly avoid jurisdictions like the United States and thereby fly above legal strictures.  They don’t break laws; they soar beyond them and above national judicial systems, operating from this open city, this free-trade zone.  They operate outside the hostile police forces, judges, grand juries, parasitic lawyers, and dealmakers within which Chris’ criminal career has been submerged. However, there is no safe harbor.  It’s a state of nature, a lethal jungle.  You make your fate.  It is in your own hands.  Hunter and hunted roam unconstrained.  Your intelligence, discipline, and willingness to engage in all forms of violence are the functions that determine whether you survive. Chris has never felt so free . . . . The streets outside rumble with the fray of commerce today.  Tomorrow?  The horizon promises domains he can create.  His history abruptly feels dated. What the hell was it?  Neil McCauley, Michael Cerrito, Chris Shiherlis, Trejo.  With all their expertise, what were they?  They were maybe the best.  But at what, being nineteenth-century bandidos robbing banks? He feels alive and vital in this present, the electric now. Mann and Gardiner, Heat 2 , 324–25

Would Neil have adapted to the Digital Age with the same flexibility and enthusiasm as his protégé?  I doubt it.  He was smart enough, sufficiently self-aware, to have recognized that about himself.  Perhaps through his dealings with Kelso in the movie, McCauley foresaw the epoch of cybercriminality soon eclipsing the kind of old-school break-and-enter scores that were his stock-in-trade.  Would certainly explain why he’d planned to abscond to Fiji after the admittedly risky downtown bank robbery.

The Irish thugs in State of Grace couldn’t accept their way of life was ending —that federal prosecutors and, more egregiously, entitled yuppies were squeezing them out of the Kitchen—so they gunned each other down in a climactic barfight, opting to go out in the same violent manner as they’d lived.  Stands to reason Neil figured one last big score, despite the heat, would set him up to get out for good—that it would be “worth the stretch.”  But his plans, his life, and arguably his very breed of thief met with their permanent cessation on the tarmac of LAX at the conclusion of Heat .  Whether he would have adjusted to, let alone thrived in, the world of globalized crime in which Chris Shiherlis has made a name for himself by the end of Heat 2 is an open question.

Mann commented in the Rolling Stone piece cited above that McCauley passed out of existence in physical contact with the only person who truly understood him—Hanna—who also happens to be the man who killed him.  But the reverse is also true, and in some ways just as tragic:  Hanna had to go on living having killed the only other person who truly understood him .  No wonder he’s so depleted, so lethargic, so devoid of purpose or human connection in the 2000 section of Heat 2 :  He’s a predator without compeer; having eradicated the last worthy adversary, Hanna is reduced to pursuing criminals who act “from deviant psychology, not operational necessity” (ibid., 377), much the same as FBI profiler Will Graham (William Petersen) in Mann’s proto–Hannibal Lecter movie Manhunter (1986).

If prequels by and large serve to elaborate on backstory affairs that were better off glimpsed than dramatized, sequels mostly exist to put the protagonist through the same old motions while tacitly asking audiences to overlook how pointless and emotionally hollow, how commercially calculated, the experience is the second (and third… and fourth…) time around.  Having burned through all the backstory by the end of the first movie, there’s no real place left emotionally to take the characters in a sequel—see:  Prescott, Sidney —which is why they’re typically unsatisfying.  Good stories are about a defining event—often the defining event—in a protagonist’s life.

Mann leans into that notion in Heat 2 , depicting latter-day Vincent Hanna as an aging detective with little raison d’être .  Hanna is quickened by an unexpected opportunity to resolve an open case from his days in Chicago during the late ’80s, only to discover a surprising—and not insignificant—connection between that investigation and his late archnemesis.  McCauley’s ghost surfaces to restore Hanna’s sense of purpose, to inspire him to recommit to his governing tenet, conceived in Granite City all those years ago, that life is about what you do with it right now.

But rather than reconsider his past ways, which would require a modicum of humility on Vincent’s part, the postlude of Heat 2 sees Hanna reinvesting his latent obsessive ambitions in a new/old target:  Chris Shiherlis.  (Something tells me Chris, a gambler far less dogmatically devoted to some self-defined solitary code than Vincent or Neil, is going to give post-prime Hanna a real run for his money.)

Hanna comes off as a rather abject “hero” to me by the end of Heat 2 , and I’m honestly not sure whether Mann intended to imply that or not.  It’s oddly fitting the novel’s final scene takes place in “a dark neighborhood throwback bar on a faded commercial street” in North Hollywood, owned by an old man (Voight’s Nate) who “smells like Brut and dry-cleaned polyester” (ibid., 23–24), because the characters who have survived this two-volume, dozen-year epic to reach the turn of the millennium, save Chris, all seem like men with no place in the post-9/11 world around the corner, like the Westies of Hell’s Kitchen in Giuliani and Bratton’s New York.

The coda of Heat , by contrast, validated the unassailable virtue of the heroic-cop archetype Hanna embodied:  Here was a man whose instincts, whose tactics, whose doggedness, whose courage, whose compassion, and whose at-all-costs commitment to his moral code were above reproach.  Since the postwar period, and certainly during the neo- noir renaissance of the 1990s, when crime was a sociopolitical fixation and our officials on both the right and left were stumbling over one another to flaunt their Dirty Harry bona fides , these were the idealized detectives our pop culture lionized .  And I don’t know that that archetypal hero has ever been portrayed more quintessentially, more compellingly, and—for all of Heat ’s psychological realism—more romantically than it was with Vincent Hanna, as created by Michael Mann and embodied by Al Pacino.

In the 1988 sequence of Heat 2 , Hanna sits at the ICU beside of a comatose girl, victim of a violent psychosexual attack.  You can practically hear Pacino delivering this monologue in your mind’s ear:

“You can come back,” he says to Jessica, holding her hand. The Korean girl couldn’t. His voice drops to a rasp.  “You are in there.  I know it.  No matter how dark it is.  On this side, there is light.  You can come back.  We are here.  We are waiting for you.” ibid., 78

With reserves of empathy so atypically deep, we completely defer to—and perhaps even take cathartic pleasure from?—Hanna’s infallible moral judgment when, during the course of his manhunt, he tosses one of the girl’s unrepentant assailants off a building rooftop (and not even remotely in self-defense).  His partner Casals turns a blind eye to it, and so do we, because Vincent, as Raymond Chandler so poetically defined Hanna’s literary archetype, is the hero; he is everything—the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.  After all, “if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things” (Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder:  An Essay,” The Simple Art of Murder [New York:  Vintage Books, August 1988], 18).

Ehh .  That seems a hell of a lot less certain in a post–George Floyd world.  So does the notion of aggrandizing righteous philosopher-detectives the likes of Vincent Hanna.  That the plot of Heat 2 spans the entirety of the 1990s is apropos, because it feels very much like a story belonging to that particular era —when comfortably violent, proudly intransigent men (played, no less, by the two biggest stars in Hollywood) were admired, even deified, just for being so goddamned sure of themselves.  Hanna and McCauley reveled in being the two toughest guys in L.A., capable of understanding only one another because of—never lose sight of this—a conscious choice each of them made to keep everyone else in their lives at a distance :

“What we can control, we control,” Neil says.  “No avoidable exposure.  No unnecessary risk.  Everything that’s gonna happen to us, we made happen.  Whether we know how or not.” Mann and Gardiner, Heat 2 , 74

What happens to us is a consequence of the choices we’ve made, whether we know it or not—whether we accept it or not.   Such is the notion Heat 2 sets out to dramatize, in its intriguing refusal to be either a conventional prequel or sequel:  “You make your fate.  It is in your own hands.  Hunter and hunted roam unconstrained.  Your intelligence, discipline, and willingness to engage in all forms of violence are the functions that determine whether you survive” (ibid., 324).

Mann demonstrates that thesis by positioning the 1988 passages, along with the 1995 events of Heat , as the disparate causes of actions and confrontations depicted in the 2000 section of Heat 2 , all the “little strings” that tie the movie and novel together forming a narrative ouroboros, in a way, leading up to and away from the life-and-death shootout between hunter and hunted at LAX, what Mann described to Rolling Stone as both the last and first moment of Heat :  the focal point of his mythic tapestry portraying unconstrained predators on the urban battlefield—men of intelligence, discipline, and the willingness to engage in all forms of violence.

I find that violence is very ambiguous in movies.  For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don’t think I’ve really seen an antiwar film.  Every film about war ends up being pro-war.  To show something is to ennoble it. François Truffaut, from an interview in the Chicago Tribune dated November 11, 1973

Could it be argued, by that logic, that all stories about crime are ultimately pro-criminality?

Perhaps.  A disproportionate percentage certainly seem to be pro-masculinity.  Women are NPCs in the world of Heat —useful as plot devices, and either unconditionally willing to accept or, alternatively, obstinately incapable of appreciating that men just need to be men .  Only alpha males, after all, truly understand other alpha males—their “game-recognizes-game professionalism and Zen machismo,” the particular world-heavy weight they bear on their shoulders owed to their extraordinary self-discipline, and especially their instinctive propensity to kill one another.

It’s no wonder, then, cops and criminals are the basis for so many of Hollywood’s alpha males.  Hypermasculine stories like Heat are ostensibly vehicles to explore and try to understand that men-will-be-men mentality—“what these men do and who they are”—but I submit that more often than not, they just wind up glorifying it .  Ennobling it.

Mann is fascinated by men like Hanna and McCauley, as are many of us, myself ( formerly ) included.  But having admired and romanticized archetypal tough guys , those with the “intelligence, discipline, and willingness to engage in all forms of violence,” to the degree of no less than 400% that we have, for as many decades as we have, through our action movies and crime fiction, it might be worth examining the unacknowledged consequences , in keeping with the thematic messaging of Heat 2 , that practice has wreaked on our culture.

The stories we tell, and retell, shape our perception of reality .  And we tell a shitload of stories celebrating men like Hanna and McCauley:  go-it-alone, hypercompetent badasses for whom the rules don’t apply—Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) of the interminable Fast & Furious series, whose paternal devotion to his family “redeems” his criminal sociopathy; Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), Carpenter’s defiantly libertarian gunfighter/outlaw antihero , his “commonsense” antidote to both the right-wing police state of Escape from New York (and Escape from L.A. ) and the communist revolutionaries who oppose it—because their personal “codes” supersede their obligations to the social compact, to say nothing of the limitations of the law.  They’re just that special.

And make no mistake:  Men use these mythologies , however unconsciously, to rationalize our self-serving behaviors and absolve ourselves from responsibility in everyday life—to position ourselves as the righteous protagonist of our very own heroic narrative in which we alone are the apodictic voice of reason in a world full of short-sighted plebeians, all those villains and bit players with whom we are grudgingly made to share the our stage.

There’s a reason macho action heroes on one end of the archetypal spectrum and stunted-adolescence slackers on the other are our two dominant representations of manhood in popular fiction:  They both, each in their own way, justify all manner of sin, none so great as behavioral stasis—that is, our birthright as men to act as we please with impunity.  And if no one understands us for that, so much the better:  Such small-minded misapprehension only validates our innate specialness—our singular heroism—anyway.

Mann’s men, Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley, are each that kind of man’s man—explicitly unwilling to consider, let alone aspire to, a healthier, less individualistic mode of masculinity .  And for as much as Mann appears to revere them for that, that McCauley is dead at the end of the movie and Hanna a weary, lonesome shell of himself by the twenty-first century is, as I interpret it, a hopeful consequence of their incorrigible lone-ranger bravado.

We don’t need men like that in the post–Donald Trump, post–Derek Chauvin era, and we sure as hell don’t need any more paeans to them, either, however nuanced such stories may strive to be.  They belong in the past, consigned to dim barrooms that cater to nostalgic old men who yearn for the days when they were masters of the universe:  the solitary heroes of a world that reliably bent to their will.  If Michael Mann’s exemplary Heat represents the sacrosanct apotheosis of the cops-and-robbers literary genre, it would be fittingly poetic—and, to my view, decidedly welcome—if his ambitious Heat 2 serves as its canonical requiem.

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19 Comments

December 15, 2022 at 10:43 am

I didn’t watch the first Heat though I actually like ‘macho action heroes’. I read a ton of Mountain Man books and my next trilogy will be about our brilliant and physically powerful ancestors, the Neanderthal. Heat I and II’s MCs don’t seem to have a moral core of justice and kindness to go with their aggressive approach to problem solving. That is why I probably turned away decades ago, probably still will.

December 15, 2022 at 12:01 pm

Heat is very much worth seeing, Jacqui. It’s in a cinematic class by itself in that it is a rich character study that doesn’t skimp on intense action sequences; rarely is such balance achieved. I can’t imagine Heat 2 would be of much interest to anyone who isn’t already a fan of the movie — it’s more of a companion piece than a sequel — but I would certainly recommend it to those (many) folks out there!

The characters in Heat — particularly Hanna, the saga’s protagonist — absolutely live by a strict code of ethics, and Hanna is a man of tremendous compassion (in opposition to McCauley, who is a sociopath). For reasons I explored in “Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown,” the “detective” (as a literary archetype) became the quintessential American hero of so much of our popular entertainment in the latter half of the 20th century. But at this point, over two decades into the new millennium, it seems apparent — at least to me — that we’ve told enough stories celebrating hypercompetent, comfortably violent, go-it-alone antiheroes, and that what this unprecedented historical moment calls for , in fact, are anti -antiheroes à la Ted Lasso and The Orville ‘s Ed Mercer. It’s time to retire the hero detective, methinks, and the police-worshipping fiction he inhabits. The spirit of self-righteous individualism he represents is not a helpful model of masculinity in light of the challenges we face right now as a country, a society, and even a civilization, which require renewed and appreciable esprit de corps .

For that reason, I think it’s a healthy thing to explore masculinity in other genres, such as comedy, science fiction, and the Western, and to consciously phase out some of the tropes and archetypes that, ultimately, promote outmoded mores. I very much think Heat 2 makes a case for dropping the curtain on its own genre, though I can’t say one way or another if that was Mann’s creative intention. But for me, it certainly did close the book — no pun intended — on the cops-and-robbers narrative.

Jacqui, I thank you so much for your steadfast support of this blog, especially after its recent programming adjustment , and I wish you and yours a happy holiday season and only the best of health and creativity in the New Year!

December 15, 2022 at 4:35 pm

A thorough review, Sean. You make me see far more into the depths of films than I accomplish on my own.

December 15, 2022 at 5:00 pm

Thanks, Dave! I’d originally planned to publish this review last September, but as I was compiling my notes, I realized I had so much to say about the book — so many thoughts and threads and insights — and that was when I finally decided I could no longer put pressure on myself to turn out a monthly deep-dive essay. This was the post that “broke” me! Haha! So, I stepped away for a few months, and worked on this review intermittently over the autumn, with the understanding that it would be ready when it was ready. Deadlines typically force me to do some of my best work, but in the case of this particular post, I think it benefitted from all the time I gave myself to conceive, compose, and revise it. I had all the time I needed to really think through all the points and permutations of my thesis.

That’s the gift blogging has given me. You think you know how you feel about something when it’s an idea swirling around in the soup of your cerebrum, but when you force yourself to write about it, you give the subject much deeper consideration and wind up drawing all sorts of connections that never would have occurred to you otherwise. I probably over think this stuff — a 6,000-word essay on Heat 2 seems rather masturbatory and bewilderingly unnecessary — but I enjoy deconstructing a narrative to see how it works and what it’s trying to say. And ever since our shared mentor Vice President Gore taught me about moral imagination , I interrogate the stories I consume through an entirely new lens now — not merely an appreciation for the techniques they employ , but an appraisal of the values they espouse . To that end, Heat 2 gave me a lot to think about.

Thank you, Dave, for your support. I wish you a happy holiday and a healthy New Year. I hope you are as optimistic as I am about the progress we are making on the climate crisis and related matters of environmental justice . There’s a lot to celebrate this season, and there’s real momentum now going into 2023. I am as hopeful as I’ve been in half-a-dozen years. Glad to be in the trenches with someone as committed and compassionate as you, sir.

December 15, 2022 at 4:52 pm

>“Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.”

Minimalism?

December 16, 2022 at 12:19 pm

Oh, boy — now you’re starting a big conversation! Why do I feel like I’m being baited, Dell?! You know of my propensity for long-windedness! Haha!

All kidding aside. McCauley’s discipline and dogma certainly draw on many of the same philosophical tools that make minimalism possible, sure. He does live minimalistically, in a sparsely furnished monochromatic home devoid of any personal touches, à la Edward Monkford . You would think someone who knew how to live so modestly wouldn’t need to take down multimillion-dollar scores on such a regular basis! What the hell’s he spending that money on? Cerrito and Shiherlis both have wives and families and big suburban homes (and Chris is constantly losing his money in Vegas), so you understand why they need to replenish the kitty so often. But given Neil’s minimal overhead, one would think he could steal with more selective infrequency…?

But I digress. What minimalism really affords us, when you boil it down, is freedom . That’s the value we receive in return for practicing minimalism. There’s financial freedom, because one needs less and therefore buys less. For instance: My wife and I own an appreciably smaller apartment than we could afford, but it’s exactly enough space for how we live, and it’s easy to keep clean because it is modest and uncluttered.

There is also temporal freedom — i.e., one’s time and attention can be invested in more selective pursuits and interests. The only thing I had to run out and buy this holiday season was a tree. That’s it. My family and I don’t exchange gifts, so all that money, pressure, time, and attention got spared this month for other things, like finalizing this essay (of which I am rather proud), and attending a performance of A Christmas Carol with my wife and mother up in Sleepy Hollow. I could do all that — and other meaningful things — because I haven’t spent the season frantically zipping from one big-box store to another like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Jingle All the Way . I actually enjoy the holidays now. Talk about the gift that keeps on giving!

There’s also emotional freedom. I told you that story the other day about how I got rid of all my childhood comic books over Thanksgiving weekend — just gave them to a friend and never looked back. For the first forty years of my life, I could’ve never done something like that. Never. Sentimentality made me a slave to material custodianship of shit I didn’t need. Instead, I experienced a refreshingly healthy emotional catharsis as I mindfully looked through each comic and remembered what it meant to me, and then let all of them go for good.

The only “sentimental” items we store in this household are our Christmas ornaments, and we have a judiciously curated “collection” of those. We have no “filler” ornaments. Every piece we own is a carefully chosen reminder of a time in our lives or a particular experience. For instance: Every kitten we’ve ever fostered is commemorated on an ornament, because they are ever and always members of our family, even if their sojourn with us was brief. In that sense, the ritual of Christmas-tree decoration becomes an annual reminder of the life we’ve spent together — a healthy appreciation for the life we’ve built together . Because those ornaments add value to our lives — they keep us connected to the past but not anchored to it — they have a place in our home. And come New Year’s Day, they go back in the closet till Thanksgiving. We don’t dwell on sentimental matters, but instead invest our time and attention in the here and now. To me, that’s the difference between a healthy “collection” verses an obsessive one, like the scores of comics and DVDs I used to own. Minimalism helped me appreciate the distinction.

I could go on. The ways in which minimalism has changed my life are well-documented . But I say the above to suggest that the value McCauley receives in return for his own discipline is also freedom — literal freedom, at that. The ability to pick up and go on a moment’s notice is what keeps him out of prison. Unfortunately, it is the thing that allows him to live such a staggeringly immoral, illegal, and emotionally vacuous life. Ultimately, Neil is a rapacious capitalist (he explicitly identifies as such in Heat 2 , though I didn’t note the page number). Neil treats everything and everyone as something to be exploited for the value he can extract from it, the cost to them be damned. That’s not a person in emotional balance with himself or society at large. So, I would say, in keeping with his extractive, sociopathic worldview, McCauley abuses minimalism more than he uses it: He treats it as yet one more resource to be exploited toward his own ends. He’s an asshole.

My friend: I wish you a very happy holiday and the best of health, creativity, and productivity in the New Year! The value you add to this blog cannot be quantified. (You’ll notice I cited “point-and-clap entertainment” in this piece, a concept you introduced me to.) Thank you.

December 18, 2022 at 9:36 am

Great to see a post from you, my friend, and so well-written and thought-provoking, although I have to admit I’ve never seen either Heat or Heat 2–not a genre I’m drawn to normally. But now I feel like I need to watch both and then come back and read this again!

December 19, 2022 at 3:22 pm

Hey, thanks, Suzanne! I’m surprised you’ve never seen Heat , because I know what a cinephile you are! Heat was notable at the time of its release because it marked the first movie in which Pacino and De Niro shared the screen. True, they’d previously costarred in The Godfather, Part II , but they didn’t have any scenes together owed to the fact that the “Vito” and “Michael” storylines are set 35 years apart.

Heat was completely overlooked by the Academy Awards that year, but I daresay has had a far longer shelf life than 1995 nominees like Apollo 13 and Sense and Sensibility . Just more proof that Hollywood awards ceremonies are popularity contests (or, more accurately, PR campaigns), not harbingers of quality or longevity or cultural reach/influence. Anyway, I would absolutely recommend you watch it! When you do, please come back to this post and let me know your thoughts.

I wish you, Ken, and Kate a very happy holiday and bountiful New Year! Thank you for being such a steadfast friend of this blog throughout the year(s). For those unaware, Suzanne has a new collection of short horror fiction coming this February from Potter’s Grove Press called At the End of It All: Stories from the Shadows . I encourage one and all to buy, read, and review it on Amazon/Goodreads!

December 19, 2022 at 6:13 pm

> Hollywood awards ceremonies are popularity contests (or, more accurately, PR campaigns), not harbingers of quality or longevity or cultural reach/influence

TBF, those things, particularly the second and third, can be difficult or impossible to judge for a movie that came out less than a year ago

Consider movies, books, TV shows, etc., that you yourself have reevaluated over time, that you now think are MUCH better or MUCH worse than you originally thought

December 20, 2022 at 4:04 pm

Huh. I think I meant to write “arbiters,” not “harbingers,” but I suppose that works, too!

Yes, quality is a more concrete short-term metric; we can acknowledge the quality of a work of art/entertainment even when we don’t personally care for it. (Case in point: I wasn’t emotionally affected by The Hateful Eight even though I admired much about it.) As we’ve discussed elsewhere on this blog (and as you addressed in “The Last Walking Infinity Throne Corrupts Infinitely” ), we can also enjoy “bad” movies while consciously recognizing the inferior quality of the filmmaking/storytelling — what I suppose are known as “guilty pleasures.” We don’t have to elevate those movies to high art in order to justify our enjoyment of them.

Such is why the institutionalized practice of anointing a canonical “winner” among all the films and TV series released in a given year is such a silly one — this is The Best — and not at all an indicator of which movies/shows will stand the test of time or shape the culture. To my knowledge, Avatar remains the highest-grossing movie of all time, and was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and yet its belated sequel is underperforming — and this despite the massive hype apparatus of the biggest entertainment corporation in the world!

Because all the hype in the world will get asses into seats, sure, but it cannot change the fact that Avatar ‘s cultural influence is minimal at best. No one cites Avatar as a seminal moviegoing experience for them. The ten-year-olds who went to see it in 2009 don’t worship it the way our generation reveres even that feature-length toy commercial The Transformers: The Movie . (Folks I know in their mid-twenties are far quicker to cite Iron Man as the movie that made the most memorably indelible impression on their nascent imaginations.) I doubt Avatar inspired so much as a single young person to pursue filmmaking, in contrast with Star Wars and Blade Runner and The Matrix in previous generations. Avatar was ephemeral; it made money , sure, but it didn’t really make a lasting impact on the culture . Twister made a fortune in 1996… and no one has seen or talked about it since.

And you’re right, Dell: One of the objectives of this blog is to look at movies and shows that made an impression on me , reevaluate them through the lens of my experience , and also try to appreciate them in the context of the sociocultural moment at which they were made. Consequently, I think I’ve taken a rather nuanced look at a great deal of my own formative influences — Heat , Superman IV , Mad Max , Young Indy , Scream , Desperado , Buffy the Vampire Slayer , NYPD Blue , Tim Burton’s Batman , State of Grace — and said, “Here’s what worked, and here’s what hasn’t aged so well.”

But you can only bring that sort of perspective to an analytical evaluation with distance , same way we could only see we were in a neo- noir period during the 1990s once we were on the other side of it. It’s okay to take time to decide how we feel about something. Twitter devolves into these “tastes great/less filling” hot-take shouting matches (an old pop-culture reference I trust you will appreciate), with one side proclaiming The Last Jedi (or what have you) a work of genius and the other a piece of shit , as if there isn’t an entire spectrum of potential reactions to be found in between — and a nebulous one, at that, given how our tastes and opinions shift with time.

When I write about a movie or TV show, I’m forced to slow down — to process how I feel about it, and, consequently, I’ll more often than not find myself admiring and criticizing it in equal measure (like I did here with Heat ). It’s so delightful to rediscover a book or movie that still speaks to me, often decades later, sometimes for entirely different reasons (like Dances with Wolves and Scent of a Woman do). And then sometimes you go back and look at something again, and it isn’t as good as you remembered — or just doesn’t resonate with you anymore. I feel that way about tons of movies, like a lot of stuff by John Carpenter ( Escape , Vampires ) and Shane Black ( The Last Boy Scout , The Long Kiss Goodnight ).

I suppose what it comes down to is this: How we respond to a story — and whether or not we continue to respond to that story with age — is a very personal thing. And it used to be that we had award ceremonies and mainstream critics acting as the arbiters — I used the right word this time! — of what was quality and what was crap . Now what we have instead is this corporate culture of brand loyalty — of superfandom . It isn’t a question of whether we enjoy Picard or Andor or House of the Dragon , but rather a question of whether or not we are “true fans” of those respective multimedia franchises; if we are — and if our fan credentials are to remain in good standing — then we watch , regardless. It’s the Digital Age way of being pressured to watch something rather than choosing to watch it, of being told This is meaningful rather than deciding for ourselves which stories have meaning to us , individually.

I have tried, with this blog, to encourage people to think more deeply about the stories they consume, to appreciate their artistry and interrogate their values, and to have the courage — because it takes courage — to let go of once-beloved stories that, for all sorts of reasons, are no longer serving us. I submit there are certain narratives that have overstayed their welcome on the cultural stage — that have had too much reach, too much influence over our cultural folkways. If “Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown” was my rude awakening about the “hero detective” archetype, then this essay on Heat 2 can be considered my formal farewell to that kind of fiction, the cancelation of my subscription to it and the values it represents. I won’t miss it.

December 20, 2022 at 3:56 pm

P.S. If you’re a fan of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), Suzanne, the narrative and aesthetic influence of Heat is all over that movie. The Dark Knight is widely considered to the greatest superhero movie of the modern era, and it simply would not exist — not in its current form — without the template Mann provided with Heat . There is no denying that (and I don’t think Nolan does).

December 23, 2022 at 8:45 pm

Of course you know, Sean, that what I picked up most in all of this is wasn’t so much the elements of the movie or book breakdowns, but the threads of choice and consequence (e.g., “What happens to us is a consequence of the choices we’ve made…”).

I do always enjoy your “nerding out” on things you love and don’t love.

December 24, 2022 at 12:10 pm

That’s the theme of the entire novel, Erik: how the “random things” that happen to us are either direct or indirect consequences of choices we’ve made, whether we recognize those connections or not. Neil believes that to be a universal truth, as evidenced by this conversation with Chris:

“You mean we cannot secure our futures playing the lotto?” “Yeah? You’d like that.” Neil’s wry grin. They know each other like books. “‘Make me a winner,’ like life’s a roulette wheel. Go ahead, give it a spin. That will fuck you up. It will not save you.” – Mann + Gardiner, Heat 2 , 74

What Neil fails to acknowledge, however, is how the choices we make impact others , like Hanna’s freeway sniper who destroyed that Korean girl’s family. Our choices carry so many consequences in this life — they radiate outwards in ways we mostly never know. Bad choices have a way of begetting bad consequences for people other than just ourselves. I think that’s worth considering — the unknown repercussions of our decisions and actions — whenever we come to the crossroads. Since we know for certain that bad choices beget bad outcomes, perhaps that will inspire us to choose better. Choosing better is a choice, too — one we never run out of chances to make. As Ebenezer Scrooge once so wisely observed (and on this very night, at that):

“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.” – Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol , 1843

Erik, my dear friend, I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I will drink tonight to your health, happiness, and bountiful productivity in 2023. May you know only the best of peace and friendship.

January 3, 2023 at 8:59 am

Very neatly done!

January 3, 2023 at 9:02 am

Thank you, Lena! You’re my first comment of the New Year! Wishing you the best of health, happiness, and creativity in ’23!

January 3, 2023 at 4:10 pm

I saw the first Heat movie a long long time ago, and all I remember is one of the characters had tinnitus. There was tinnitus in there, right? Lol. Your post intrigued me and now I think I should watch the first one again and the second one after that. My husband likes these kinds of movies. I wouldn’t normally gravitate toward them, but I can’t help giving them a try when they have high quality actors. An entertaining look into the films, Sean. Have a wonderfully productive and exciting new year. 🙂

January 3, 2023 at 5:03 pm

Happy New Year, Diana!

Tinnitus is not a plot point in Heat , no, but it plays a substantial role in James Mangold’s Cop Land (1997) with Sylvester Stallone, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, and Robert De Niro. Perhaps that’s the movie you’re thinking of…? They’re of the same era and genre (and both feature De Niro in a prominent role).

Heat is always worth revisiting! More than merely an “action movie” or “shoot-’em-up,” it’s a magnificent crime epic, for sure — the magnum opus of Michael Mann’s illustrious filmmaking career. Great writing and stellar performances. It has deservedly stood the test of time, hence the reason we’re now getting an official sequel — 27 years later… and in a completely different medium! I can’t think of any other instance of a filmmaker revisiting a particular concept and characters decades later in a companion novel to the original film! To that end, Heat 2 is very much worth reading… but it’s best to be recently refreshed on the events of the movie before cracking the spine; it isn’t a standalone sequel.

Let me take this opportunity, Diana, to thank you for your steadfast support of this blog, and to wish you health, happiness, creativity, and comfort in 2023!

July 20, 2023 at 11:30 am

Sean, you’ve outdone yourself. Twenty or thirty years ago (pre-blog), this piece would’ve been published in a cinema magazine and dissected in college courses. I hope that somewhere, somehow, Michael Mann gets to read this.

August 10, 2023 at 12:40 pm

Thanks so much for the kind words! Yes, in its way, this essay is as epic as Heat itself! This was the post that definitely “broke” me, because when I first started composing it in September of last year, I realized I was taking on a project that would easily consume the entire month, leaving no time for my other writing. That’s when I realized I was investing too much time and attention in the blog, and had to scale back . But when I finally published this analysis in December, I had so much to say about the novel — as you can see! I’m so excited to finally discuss the book with someone else who’s actually read it! You are the first person I actually know who’s read Heat 2 .

You were kind enough to share your thoughts on the book — as well as you reaction to this essay — in a private correspondence. If you don’t mind, I’m going to publish my responses to some of your points here, occassionally excerpting from your e-mail. Having actually read the book, you raised some issues no one else — including myself — thought to address.

Neil and Hanna are great characters, but we already knew that. Now the trick here is that I can’t be 100% certain if that character work would read as deep if not for what DeNiro and Pacino brought in the film. Getting into Hanna’s cop-mind gave him more depth, as did seeing Neil during a time when he wasn’t averse to attachments. It’s Chris, however, who benefits the most from this story. Hell, it’s mostly his story. He’s a career criminal who has done some wretched things, but we’re given the complete picture of the man here in a way that the film never could.

As I noted, it’s impossible to read any of the dialogue in this book and not hear the actors from the film delivering it in your mind’s ear. That’s tough to do. Hell, I’ve read novelizations of movies that don’t capture the unique speech cadences and nonverbal mannerisms of the characters, as embodied by the actors who portrayed them, as well as Heat 2 does!

For that reason, I don’t quite share the same sense of excitement I see online at the prospect of Adam Driver as McCauley , and possibly Timothée Chalamet as Hanna , in a proposed screen adaptation. That’s not the same as casting a younger actor to play a less mature version of an established character — like, say, the way River Pheonix played young Indy in the prologue of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , where he was clearly hired to impersonate Harrison Ford’s performance to the best of his ability. (That’s not a criticism. Pheonix is wonderful in the role, channeling all of Indy’s cocksure swagger, adventurous spirit, and honorable intentions, but without the jaded optimism the character would later in his life develop.)

With Driver and Chalamet, we’d get completely different interpretations of those characters, though. That’s fine for a remake of Heat , but Heat 2 , the novel, is clearly designed as a prequel- cum -sequel to the 1995 feature film and, as such, draws on the reader’s familiarity with the movie’s cinematic aesthetic and its performances. A movie or miniseries adaptation of Heat 2 would be a true oddity: an adaptation of a book that serves as a prequel/sequel to a film produced almost three decades earlier, with entirely different actors inhabiting roles played by two of the biggest actors of their generation. I mean, if anyone could pull something like that off, it’s Michael Mann, but I think Heat 2 should be left as a literary supplement to a cinematic masterpiece. I’m not in favor of a screen adaptation of this book.

Agreed: If Heat was Hanna and McCauley’s story, Heat 2 is Chris Shiherlis’. More so than even Pacino and De Niro, Val Kilmer had to convey a lot about that character through his performance, as we really learn precious few biographical details about Chris. Heat 2 really gives this character a chance to be in the spotlight, and it’s fun learning about the early days of both his criminal career and his romance with Charlene, as well as what happened to him after the movie. Had that plotline been made into a spin-off movie of its own a few years after Heat , it would have been wonderful to see Kilmer as the lead. He would’ve crushed it. (Perhaps Jack Kilmer could essay the role?)

Elisa is a notable character, too. One thing I’ve been ruminating on, though, is if her death is “fridging,” ie. killing a woman character to advance the main guy’s story. Ultimately, I don’t think so. Elisa died because of the choices she made to ensure Gabriela would be safe. Her death does change Neil into the man from the movie, but she wasn’t a helpless damsel cut down solely for the narrative.

Agreed. Elisa has agency in the story. And while her death might not meet the textbook criteria to qualify as “fridging,” Elisa and Gabriela only serve the story insofar as they put the male characters — Neil, Wardell, Hanna, Chris — into violent conflict with one another. Overall, I find the portrayals of women in both Heat and Heat 2 to be lacking. But for reasons I address in the essay, this is a story about men — and about masculinity — for better and for worse.

Let’s talk about the heist plans / crime syndicate stuff. I don’t read crime thrillers, so I don’t have much to compare it, but goddamn that stuff read as believable. I have no idea how Mann researched all of that. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. And yet I was never overwhelmed or glossed over the details. It all read as vital information, because Neil or Chris presented it as vital. Bank robbery tools, guidance missile systems, weapon specs…very impressive.

Mann’s gift as a storyteller is his equal attention to procedural detail and psychological verisimilitude. It’s there in Thief and Manhunter , too. When you combine that with his singular cinematic aesthetic, you get crime thrillers that look and feel like no other. For me — and for many — Heat certainly represents the apotheosis of all those elements. Without question, those storytelling priorities — along with his fascination with “game-recognizes-game professionalism and Zen machismo” — are evident in Heat 2 .

Otis Wardell as a villain is probably the weakest link in the story. He’s too much of a villain. There’s no depth to him beyond his crimes and vile appetites. His home invasions were rough to read, shifting the tone to an almost serial killer story. I’m not saying his actions need a justification, or that we need to feel for him, but he was very one note. And his obsession with Neil was thin. Otis was pissed that Grimes was paying too much attention to Neil’s crew over him, so he embarked on this crazy vendetta? I don’t know if I buy it. Still, very exciting to read. Shit, when he showed up at Gabriela’s diner? I felt that.

If Neil is sociopathic, Wardell is psychopathic. As Hanna observes, he operates “from deviant psychology, not operational necessity.” So, in that sense, he provides a contrast to both McCauley and Hanna. But I agree he is mostly a standard-issue psychosexual creep, same as you’d find in any by-the-numbers Alex Cross thriller. Even though he provides the connective tissue between the 1988 and 2000 sections of the story, he was, in many respects, the least interesting element to me, hence the reason I didn’t even address him in this essay. It was as though Mann took Waingro and made him the primary antagonist of the story.

I wanted a bit more out of the 1988 story, too, after Elisa’s death. I know that bits of what happened after are covered in dialogue in the 2000 section, and it’s probably a good place to end that section, but I wasn’t ready to leave that part yet. I wanted more time with Neil. Likewise, the shift from 1996 to 2000 was a bit abrupt, but I’m guessing that once Chris fully committed to being Ana’s business and romantic partner, there wasn’t much reason to stay in ’96. It’s a tough thing to balance, knowing when to skip years ahead.

Both stylistically and structurally, this is where the sequel both departs and distinguishes itself from the mothership story. It’s a nonlinear narrative, like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and so much of our postnarrative fiction these days, in contrast with the conventional dramatic presentation of Heat . Obviously, that had less to do with a creative experimentation than creative necessity: McCauley’s death at the end of Heat meant Mann had no choice but to go the Godfather II route. The shifts are indeed abrupt, and I think what I said in the essay above holds true: This novel might try the patience of a reader who isn’t already predisposed to both Mann and the world of Heat via the goodwill established by the movie. I don’t know that this is a novel that stands on its own two legs, ultimately. It’s just a supremely well-crafted supplement to the movie — a gift for fans, without itself being fan fiction.

Random, but I disagree about your assessment of The Exorcist TV show. I really enjoyed that, particularly Season 2 which was removed from the movie. It followed a foster father (John Cho) and his group of kids who fall victim to possession. Though I suppose in that respect, it’s only The Exorcist in name.

Completely fair. I only ever watched (part of?) the first season. The original Exorcist ( R.I.P. William Friedkin ) is a story (because I’m referring both to the novel and the movie) about which I have conflicted feelings. It’s aesthetically brilliant — terrifying in a way few horror stories ever achieve — but I find it absolutely morally reprehensible. Not because I find it sacrilegious — quite the contrary! It’s about a woman who is so selfishly focused on her career — the nerve! — that her preteen daughter is left to her own devices and accidentally summons a demon (a brown-skinned Iraqi demon, at that) with a Ouija board. Both mother and daughter have zero agency in the events of the story, so it falls to a pair of virtuous Catholic priests — two “Fathers” — to save the day. It is seriously the most repugnant piece of patriarchal propaganda — with a dollop of racism, to boot — I’ve ever read. But, unlike so many horror authors, Blatty’s prose, characterization, and dialogue — and Friedkin’s visuals — are really masterful. I only wish they’d been in service to a more ethical story . That’s another narrative that needs to be left in the pop-cultural dustbin of the 20th century… though nostalgia-addicted Gen-Xer David Gordon Green has other plans!

If you’ve never read it, I highly recommend Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts , which is to The Exorcist what Scream is to Halloween : both a terrifying specimen of the genre as well as a fascinating deconstruction of its tropes. It’s a story about how manipulative stories can be. One of the best novels, horror or otherwise, I’ve read in a decade.

So cool that Heat was your first movie date, and quite an intense choice! When you have personal milestones like that attached to a film, it stays with you forever.

I’d love to be able to say we selected that film to see on our first date because it was an epic cinematic event featuring two of the most intense actors of their day, but it had everything to do with the running time: Since I was coming down from the Bronx and she was coming in from Queens — and this was right after the blizzard of ’96, which dumped record snowfall on NYC — we figured we should find a movie long enough to justify the interboro schlep! LOL! The movie ran from noon to 3:00 p.m. Afterwards, we browsed the shelves at Barnes & Noble for an hour — I needed to find a gift for my sister’s upcoming birthday — and then had an early dinner at Pizzeria Uno. After dinner, neither of us was ready to go home, so we strolled the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art till the place closed at 10:00. So, we had a ten-hour first date! The rest is history .

Michael Mann spoiled the cops and robbers genre, hahhaha. Very true. He spoiled it for himself, too. I wanted to love Public Enemies , hoping for another Heat , and I literally was fighting sleep the whole time.

Public Enemies and Miami Vice (the movie) both left me cold, but it’s possible I was in a bad mood when I saw them. I should give them another go at some point.

I like your exploration of interconnectivity, micro cause and effect. Mann handles it so well. If you think about how the characters all converged at the end — Hanna, Chris, Gabriela, Otis — it’s thrilling without stretching credibility.

It’s the theme of the story. By the principles of storytelling logic, the climax of Heat 2 certainly strains credulity — the fact that everyone wound up in L.A. at that precise moment , only to see their lives intersect explosively. And yet I keep coming back to the notion that it’s the very cosmic relationship between coincidence and causality that Mann is exploring in this novel. He’s trying to get us to think about these issues — to appreciate the complexity of our shared existence on this earth. I have to give him this: Heat 2 has something to say about the world; it aspires to greater subtextual weight than your average pulp-fiction potboiler. I’ll always give the benefit of the doubt to a story that perhaps tries too hard to be intellectual, to be deep , than one that doesn’t try at all ( like, say, Fast & Furious ).

Prequel’s offering “storyworld omniscience” is a great phrase and description for their popularity. “Narrative Ouroboros” was another prose gem.

Thanks! I explore what I think a prequel should and shouldn’t be in “ Young Indiana Jones Turns 30: Storytelling Lessons from George Lucas’ Other Prequel Series.” Even if you’re unfamiliar with Young Indy , the essay has broader applications for pop culture. I lament our culture’s current fixation on “shared universes” — with dot-connecting and plot-point reconciliation. That sort of puzzle-boxing bullshit completely misses the point of what stories are meant to be about, a subject I explored in “Into Each Generation a Slayer Is Born .” For instance, a few months ago I saw a headline for an article entitled “Hugh Grant Confirms He Is ‘Married to James Bond’ in ‘Knives Out’ Cinematic Universe.”

Sorry — what ? The “ Knives Out Cinematic Universe”? It’s a movie … with a sequel . Not everything is a goddamn universe. Calm… the fuck… down.

And while I ultimately think Heat 2 , as both a prequel and sequel, is an unnecessary addendum to a perfectly self-contained cinematic masterpiece, it’s fascinating the way in which Mann plays with our need to draw narrative connections, to attain storyworld omniscience. And the fact that Heat 2 is ultimately so unnecessary only demonstrates how pointless the pursuit of storyworld omniscience is at all. Both Hanna and McCauley understand how meaningless it is to try to “puzzle out” the cosmic mysteries . Instead, they take meaning from who they are, what they do, and the people in their direct orbit, however it was they got there. There’s a lesson there, methinks.

Jeff, thanks again for engaging me so passionately on this subject. And I appreciate your patience while I found time to give your insights the proper attention and response they deserved. You’re the man!

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Book Review: “Heat 2”

When Michael Mann’s iconic film “Heat” first came out in 1995, it was critically acclaimed and commercially successful, and went on to influence many subsequent filmmakers. Now, twenty-seven years later, Michael Mann, in collaboration with the Edgar Award winning writer Meg Gardiner, has released the novel “Heat 2,” which is both a prequel and a sequel to “Heat.” While “Heat” was set in primarily in one location (the city of Los Angeles), “Heat 2” spans multiple locations, both within the United States and globally. With “Heat 2,” Mann and Gardiner have created a truly epic vision of the evolution of crime from home invasions, bank heists, and drug cartels, to the labyrinthine international sphere of cyber-attacks and government weapons sales for covert wars and assassinations.

“Heat 2” begins with a prologue that briefly describes the central bank heist from “Heat,” and then follows the immediate aftermath of that event with the character of Chris Shiherlis. The central characters of “Heat 2” are carry-overs from “Heat”; in addition to Sheherlis, we follow the lives of Neil McCauley and Lt. Vincent Hanna from “Heat,” along with several other repeating characters ranging from Charlene Shiherlis to Sergeant Drucker and Nate. Like the non-linear narrative of “The Godfather II,” “Heat 2” goes back and forth in time between 1988, 1995 and the years following it, and onto the year 2000. Although “Heat 2” highlights the lives of Neil and Vincent like the first “Heat” film did, its primary focus becomes Chris, as his character evolves to become Mann and Gardiner’s bridge to what they view as the future of crime on a more global level.

While “Heat” mostly focused on a single bank heist in Los Angeles, “Heat 2” has three major heists, and the storyline eventually expands to the criminal exploits of a Taiwanese crime family living in Paraguay. In addition, “Heat 2” has a truly horrific villain with the character of Otis Wardell, a hulking and physically imposing sociopath who is the leader of a gang whose crimes range from rape, home invasion, to murder. In a way, Otis and his criminal antics, along with the heists of Neil and Chris from their earlier 1988 and 1995 years, represent a sort of primitive form of criminal activity that Mann and Gardiner view as outdated in a world rapidly becoming controlled by technological and international interests.

This is where the Taiwanese Liu family comes in, as their specialty is in the cyber-crimes world of international covert coding and illegal arms dealing. The Liu family is headed by the patriarch David, whose daughter Ana and son Felix both have aspirations to take over the family business. Chris eventually falls for Ana, and in the process becomes a strongman and advisor for the Liu family in their illegal business dealings. While it’s admirable that Mann and Gardiner have fully-fleshed out Asian characters in “Heat 2,” they also fall into the trap of having effeminate, non-masculine Asian male leads. With the exception of the strong family patriarch David, the character of Felix is portrayed as having a delicate disposition and his rival Claudio Chen is shown as being sexually ambiguous. These traits fit the stereotypical Westernized portrayal of Asian males as being demasculinized. This is made up for with the character of Ana, who is not a typical submissive Asian female; rather, she is strong, independent, and a force to be reckoned with as she tries to take over her family’s cyber criminal empire.

Mann has explored the topic of cybercrime in Asia before with his underrated film “Blackhat,” which also features prominent Asian characters working with a career criminal in the shady world of international cyber warfare. In fact, “Heat 2” is almost like a greatest hits collection of Mann’s previous films, including a bank vault heist similar to the one in “Thief,” a sociopathic serial killer recalling the villain from “Manhunter,” the criminal underworld of Los Angeles which Mann previously explored in “Heat” and “Collateral,” a South American criminal empire similar to the drug cartels in “Miami Vice,” and an examination of the intriguing world of covert government surveillance that Mann explored in “Public Enemies.” Mann and Gardiner take these elements from his previous films and expand upon them in “Heat 2” with a kaleidoscopic exploration of the evolution of crime from a micro to a macro scale.

It’s interesting how the more narrowly centered first half of “Heat 2,” which concentrates on Vincent’s relentless pursuit of Otis, and Neil and Chris’ earlier tightly organized criminal activities, contrasts with the more sprawling second half dealing with Chris’ indoctrination into the Liu family’s global scale crimes. Just as Chris feels hinged in and restricted by his dealings with Neil, his world and that of “Heat 2’s” narrative opens up when Chris discovers the broader, internationally focused world of the Liu family’s technological criminal empire. Mann and Gardiner bring Chris and the reader into the dangerously exhilarating world of dark web cyber dealings with covert government agencies and corrupt technocrats, traversing the globe from the United States, to Indonesia and Singapore. It’s quite an exciting trip, and one that Mann and Gardiner skillfully and entertainingly allow the reader to ride along with them on.

With its quick, terse and to-the-point prose style, “Heat 2” reads almost like a screenplay. Indeed, Mann has already stated that he plans to adapt “Heat 2” into a film as his next project after his racing car biopic “Ferrari.” It will be interesting to see how Mann casts the film, as he has expressed no interest in using the same de-aging process Scorsese employed in “The Irishman.” Most likely, this means Mann will cast new actors to replace the iconic roles played by legendary actors like Robert DeNiro , Al Pacino , and Jon Voight. Whoever Mann eventually chooses to play the roles in “Heat 2” will have big shoes to fill, but with Mann’s skill and expertise as a filmmaker, we shouldn’t have anything to worry about when the cameras eventually roll. In the meantime, we have the intricate and pulse-pounding novel version of “Heat 2” to enjoy and envision in our heads.

• Book Review: "Heat 2"

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Books, Film, TV, Culture.

One More Big Score

‘Heat 2,’ a note-perfect book sequel to one of the greatest heist films of all time

Heat 2 is a novel that is both sequel and prequel to the movie Heat, written and directed by Michael Mann , widely considered one of the greatest heist films of all time. That’s a job at least as big as the high-powered scores taken down by the crew of thieves in the original. The book picks up the story of characters last seen in 1995, which was a whole other century. iPhones hadn’t even been invented yet.

But Mann and his co-author, the accomplished thriller writer Meg Gardiner, pull it off with the same clocktick precision and style of the screen version. It’s a brilliant ride from start to finish, and the 480 pages fly by.

The novel begins where the film ended, a few hours after LAPD Detective Vincent Hanna (played by Al Pacino in the movie) kills Neil McCauley (played by Robert DeNiro), the leader of the thieves who turned an L.A. city street into a war zone when Hanna interrupted their bank robbery.

Hanna chases Chris Shiherlis (played by Val Kilmer), Neil’s partner and the sole survivor of the crew, across LA. Chris is wounded and barely able to stand, but makes a run for the Mexico border, leaving his wife Charlene and their child behind.

It’s not spoiling too much to say he gets away, and that he’ll be back.

The book then jumps back in time to 1988, when Hanna had a previously unmentioned career on the Chicago police force at the same time that Neil and Chris were in town for a big job.

The real dilemma of Heat 2 is that you want to root for both the cops and the robbers. The authors have a solution, of course. Neil and Chris are not good guys by any means—they murder and steal and terrorize innocent people—but as in the movie, there are worse guys out there, and they fill the role of villains.

While Neil’s crew is pulling its scores in Chicago, Hanna chases a home-invasion crew led by Otis Wardell, a rapist and murderer. Wardell kills wealthy families in the city’s Gold Coast neighborhood to get back at an abusive mother, and also because he really enjoys that sort of thing. While evading Hanna, Wardell learns about Neil’s crew, and decides he wants a cut of their action.

The authors draw all these threads together until they hum with tension. And then, when the story in Chicago reaches a breaking point, they fling you forward in time again, to Chris and his new career as bodyguard for the Lius, a Taiwanese family of black-market entrepreneurs in Ciudad del Este, a free-trade zone in Paraguay where crime is just business by other means. Chris works his way into the family’s trust, and into the arms of the family’s brilliant daughter Ana.

And then the story shifts back to the past again, when Neil and Chris and the crew are plotting to take down a drug cartel cash house in Mexico, unaware that Wardell is right behind them.

All of these disparate plots are intense and thrilling enough to keep the reader glued to the page, even as we’re knocked around in time. As in the movie, part of the fun is seeing how the story continues, how the complications pile up and the characters manage to escape by the narrowest of margins.

But we also go deep into the motivations and biographies of the characters. The movie conveyed a lot of unspoken history through the performances of its actors and the style of its direction—Neil and Chris’ loyalty to one another, Chris’ search for the perfect rush, Hanna’s relentless need to win—without exposition or explanation.

The novel brings all that backstory to the surface. It adds more to the mystique even while it reveals the characters’ pasts.

Again, these are not good people. Hanna is a barely functional human being outside of work, racking up divorces and disappointed women like he’s earning airline miles for them. Neil and Chris are vicious predators to anyone outside their protected circle, even if they’re not rabid animals like Wardell. You would not want to hang out with any of them in real life for longer than it takes to finish a beer.

But in the world of the novel, you can spend all day in their company. You care about what happens to them. You want them to succeed, and you worry about them, despite everything. That’s hard, but the authors make it look easy.

The style and cadence of the writing calls to mind James Ellroy or the Cartel trilogy of Don Winslow: fragmented sentences and indelible images, peppered with perfectly timed observations, settings rendered vividly with one or two lines. In between the explosive action scenes, there are surprisingly complete tutorials on theft, transnational crime, and money laundering.

If there’s a letdown, it comes at the end, mainly because it seems like the story could easily go on for another hundred pages. Like the characters say, over and over, it is hard to let go of the action, even when you know it’s the smart move. But at least there’s plenty left for a sequel.

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Christopher Farnsworth

Chris Farnsworth is the author of six novels, including Flashmob (one of PW’s Best Books of 2017), Killfile , and The President's Vampire . His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, the Awl, E! Online, the Washington Monthly and the New Republic. He's also written screenplays and comic books.

2 thoughts on “ One More Big Score ”

Nice review, makes me want to watch the movie again. Do we ever find out how Neil and Chris met Michael and Waingro?

Thank you. We don’t get that part, sadly. I bet there’s a really good story in how they met Michael. Hopefully that’s in the next one.

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Michael Mann, four-time-Oscar-nominated writer-director of The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider, Ali, Miami Vice, Collateral, and Heat teams up with Edgar Award-winning author Meg Gardiner to deliver Mann’s first novel, an explosive return to the universe and characters of his classic crime film-with an all-new story unfolding in the years before and after the iconic movie.

One day after the end of Heat, Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) is holed up in Koreatown, wounded, half delirious, and desperately trying to escape LA. Hunting him is LAPD detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). Hours earlier, Hanna killed Shiherlis’s brother in arms Neil McCauley (De Niro) in a gunfight under the strobe lights at the foot of an LAX runway. Now Hanna’s determined to capture or kill Shiherlis, the last survivor of McCauley’s crew, before he ghosts out of the city.

In 1988, seven years earlier, McCauley, Shiherlis, and their highline crew are taking scores on the West Coast, the US-Mexican border, and now in Chicago. Driven, daring, they’re pulling in money and living vivid lives. And Chicago homicide detective Vincent Hanna’a man unreconciled with his history-is following his calling, the pursuit of armed and dangerous men into the dark and wild places, hunting an ultraviolent gang of home invaders.

Meanwhile, the fallout from McCauley’s scores and Hanna’s pursuit cause unexpected repercussions in a parallel narrative, driving through the years following Heat.

Heat 2 projects its dimensional and richly drawn men and women into whole new worlds-from the inner sanctums of rival crime syndicates in a South American free-trade zone to transnational criminal enterprises in Southeast Asia. The novel brings you intimately into these lives. In Michael Mann’s Heat universe, they will confront new adversaries in lethal circumstances beyond all boundaries.

Heat 2 is engrossing, moving, and tragic-a masterpiece of crime fiction with the same extraordinary ambitions, scope, and rich characterizations as the epic film.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER.

Michael Mann on his prequel/sequel, "Heat 2"

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How Heat 2 connects to Michael Mann's other films, too

Billed as a prequel and sequel to Heat, the director's new novel also connects to his other films in various thematic and aesthetic ways.

Christian Holub is a writer covering comics and other geeky pop culture. He's still mad about 'Firefly' getting canceled.

Michael Mann 's first novel is out this week, and it is billed as both a prequel and sequel to his most popular film. The title is simple enough: Heat 2 . But though the book (co-written with crime novelist Meg Gardiner) catches readers up with what memorable Heat characters like Al Pacino 's Vincent Hanna and Val Kilmer 's Chris Shiherlis were doing both in the years before and after the events of the 1995 L.A. crime saga, it also interweaves with ideas and themes from several other Mann films as well.

Here are all the references we found!

Mann was born and raised in Chicago, and you can still hear the accent in his voice when he gives interviews. His first few films were set there and were suffused with the Windy City's specific flavor of crime. Thief surrounded star James Caan with real-life cops and criminals from Chicago (some of whom, like Dennis Farina, went on to have full-fledged acting careers) and thus imbued its story of high-stakes diamond theft with a lived-in authenticity that Mann has brought to his subsequent projects.

Heat is famously set in L.A., where Mann has lived for decades, but it is based on real-life cops and criminals from Chicago. The real-life bank robber Neil McCauley (whose name went unchanged for Robert De Niro's screen portrayal) was killed by real-life Chicago cop Chuck Adamson (the loose basis for Hanna) in 1964. In keeping with this history, the sections of Heat 2 that take place before the events of the film are mostly set in Chicago. Readers see Hanna working as a detective there in the late '80s, tracking down a serial rapist and home burglar named Otis Wardell — and don't worry, the plot ends up providing a pretty satisfying explanation for why Hanna eventually left the city and ended up in L.A.

Before that, we're treated to inside knowledge of Chicago policing and politics — Hanna dismissively notes that his superior officer doesn't care about catching Wardell so much as "he cares about greasing the machine: Cook County, city hall, the CPD brass, or the Outfit machine" — and lots of local history. At one point, Hanna ponders how his family started as "immigrants from Lombardy who came to work the accessible clay deposits into bricks and the stone left standing when the glaciers slid by to the east."

The Insider

The Insider is an interesting outlier in Mann's filmography. Like many of his films, it portrays expert criminals and the professionals tasked with stopping them. But instead of cops chasing bank robbers, The Insider is about hard-nosed journalists digging up the secrets that tobacco corporations hid from the public. Pacino stars as 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman, while Russell Crowe plays former tobacco executive-turned-whistleblower, Jeffrey Wigand.

If you're familiar with that film, there's a moment in Heat 2 that will make you smile. In the wake of the botched bank robbery depicted in Heat , Chris Shiherlis flees L.A. and ends up in South America with a new alias: "Jeffrey Bergman," a portmanteau of The Insider protagonists' names.

But there's also another connection. The opening scene of The Insider finds Bergman blindfolded in the back of a van, being escorted through Lebanon in order to secure an interview between his star reporter and the leader of Hezbollah. When Chris ends up in a Paraguayan free trade zone called Ciudad del Este in Heat 2 , he remarks that Hezbollah fighters are one of the main groups to have immigrated to the City of the East and he often notices Lebanese people around the city.

Fans of the Miami Vice TV series were understandably disappointed when the 2006 film version replaced the flashy cars and Italian suits with a grimy, documentary-style look at international crime in the age of globalized neoliberalism. But fans who have come to regard the Miami Vice movie as an underrated masterpiece will be excited to know that Mann is still very interested in this topic, and even describes it in much the same way.

Over the course of Miami Vice , what first seems like a simple undercover drug smuggling operation becomes a window into a breathtakingly complex international cartel that traffics not just drugs but guns, technology, and all kinds of other goods. When reporting their finds to superiors, Miami detectives Crockett ( Colin Farrell ) describes the castle's leader Arcángel de Jesús Montoya (Luis Tosar) as "the new news." When Chris Shiherlis comes face to face with the reality of Ciudad del Este, where everything's for sale and crime is just business, he describes this end-of-history every-man-for-himself environment as "the new new."

That's not the only similarity between Crockett and Chris. Employed by the Liu crime family in Ciudad del Este, Chris falls for the brilliant Ana Liu — whose tactical genius and intuitive understanding of the new economy are overlooked by her patriarchal father in favor of her party boy brother. Chris and Ana are not a match meant to last — he will eventually have to return to the family he abandoned in L.A. at the end of Heat , while she can't date the hired muscle when an arranged match could bring her family greater power — but that makes their connection even more romantic. As Ana says to Chris, since their relationship has "no future," there is "nothing to worry about" in terms of connecting too deeply. That's almost exactly the same exchange Crockett and Isabella (Gong Li) have while pondering their own love affair in Miami Vice .

Does Chris and Ana's love affair end up any better than theirs? We won't spoil it. You'll just have to read Heat 2 for yourself.

In the midst of Heat 2 's publication, Mann is currently filming Ferrari with Adam Driver in Italy. This is exciting news for the director's fans because when released, Ferrari will be his first feature film in almost a decade. Seven years ago, Blackhat flopped hard at the box office, but not before delivering a further exploration of the international crime depicted in Miami Vice .

Except that by 2015, Mann understood that big-money robberies no longer take the form of urban shootouts between cops and gangsters. Now it happens on the internet, with even further global reach. Heat 2 's chronology ends in 2000, several years removed from the era of the hacker named Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth), but it reflects the global rise of computer technology and Asian economies that are both so central to Blackhat .

The connective tissue between the two stories is Kelso, the computer expert played by Tom Noonan in Heat . He shows up again in Heat 2 to help Chris and Ana with their cybersecurity, and Chris reflects that Kelso is always "ahead of the curve" — much like Mann himself.

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Heat 2: A Novel Hardcover – Aug. 9 2022

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Instant #1  New York Times  Bestseller!

Michael Mann, four-time-Oscar-nominated writer-director of  The Last of the Mohicans ,  The Insider ,  Ali ,  Miami Vice ,  Collateral , and  Heat  teams up with Edgar Award–winning author Meg Gardiner to deliver Mann’s first novel, an explosive return to the universe and characters of his classic crime film—with an all-new story unfolding in the years before and after the iconic movie

“A hard-boiled, cinematic read that moves as fast as a well-planned heist.” — Esquire

One day after the end of  Heat , Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) is holed up in Koreatown, wounded, half delirious, and desperately trying to escape LA. Hunting him is LAPD detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). Hours earlier, Hanna killed Shiherlis’s brother in arms Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) in a gunfight under the strobe lights at the foot of an LAX runway. Now Hanna’s determined to capture or kill Shiherlis, the last survivor of McCauley’s crew, before he ghosts out of the city.

In 1988, seven years earlier, McCauley, Shiherlis, and their highline crew are taking scores on the West Coast, the US-Mexican border, and now in Chicago. Driven, daring, they’re pulling in money and living vivid lives. And Chicago homicide detective Vincent Hanna—a man unreconciled with his history—is following his calling, the pursuit of armed and dangerous men into the dark and wild places, hunting an ultraviolent gang of home invaders.

Meanwhile, the fallout from McCauley’s scores and Hanna’s pursuit cause unexpected repercussions in a parallel narrative, driving through the years following  Heat .

Heat 2  projects its dimensional and richly drawn men and women into whole new worlds—from the inner sanctums of rival crime syndicates in a South American free-trade zone to transnational criminal enterprises in Southeast Asia. The novel brings you intimately into these lives. In Michael Mann’s Heat universe, they will confront new adversaries in lethal circumstances beyond all boundaries.

Heat 2  is engrossing, moving, and tragic—a masterpiece of crime fiction with the same extraordinary ambitions, scope, and rich characterizations as the epic film.

• Print length 480 pages
• Language English
• Publisher William Morrow
• Publication date Aug. 9 2022
• Dimensions 15.24 x 3.68 x 22.86 cm
• ISBN-10 0062653318
• ISBN-13 978-0062653314
• See all details

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“Propulsive.” — Sam Sifton,  New York Times

“ Heat 2  is just dynamite.” — Associated Press

“Mann's long relationship with his central protagonists, and fondness for research, are evident on almost every page of this propulsive universe-expansion. . . . Reading this novel, and the cliffhanger ending, definitely leaves you wanting another book set in the same world.” — Entertainment Weekly

“Mann’s brooding moments of sublime isolation are there in abundance, combined with Gardiner’s deft touch for modern thrillers. The result is an intensely satisfying crime story.” — Crimereads

"Riveting. . . . The best thing about this innovative tale is the way the fully fleshed human stories support and even transcend the often-breathtaking action." — Booklist [starred review]

“Prepare for an epic journey of the seven years before the bank heist that would change all of their lives and the events that unfold afterward, bringing in a new cast of riveting characters. . . The world of international drug cartels and crime syndicates has never been so gripping. Heat was a cinematic spectacle, and this sequel manages to create the same immersive experience in written form.”  — Library Journal (starred review)

" Heat 2 is a must for fans of the film." — USA Today

"A hard-boiled, cinematic read that moves as fast as a well-planned heist. If you were obsessed with  Heat , you’ll want  Heat 2  to last." — Esquire

"A genuinely exhilarating expansion of the movie’s world, complete . . . some truly jaw-dropping, bullet-filled set pieces." — Rolling Stone

"An expansive crime novel that feels of a piece with Mann’s filmography, from its hypercompetent, ambitious characters to the richly detailed underworlds they operate in." — Vulture

“ Heat 2 is a fascinating book . . . [that] brings Michael Mann's exacting vision, improbably, to the page.” — GQ

"Told in a style as propulsive and cinematic as the film, Heat 2 is an exciting and engrossing tale." — AV Club

“ Heat 2 moves at a near breakneck pace, sweeping us along like an addictive film. The result is an action-packed page-turner that fully engulfs us in the moody, bloody, romantic worlds Mann creates in his films.” — Slash Film

"Mann’s stunning prequel/sequel to his 1995 classic. . . an intoxicatingly relentless gem. . . a novel to be devoured more than once." — The Film Stage

“There is something kind of wonderful about making the prequel/sequel a novel rather than a film… Mann and Gardiner have produced an excellent thriller. . . Heat 2  goes full  The Godfather Part II .” — Austin Chronicle

“ Heat 2 is a classic of the crime genre . . . Realism permeates Mann’s world, and the world he created in  Heat  was rich enough for the writer-director to decide that he needed to expand the universe further. . . . It dives deeper into the rich criminal underworld and complicated lives of his thieves and cops. . . . If you’re a fan of the crime genre, you can only hope we get more from [Mann] and his crew soon.”  — The Spectator World

“This will be a must for fans of the movie, but the novel stands on its own too, as an epic L.A. crime feast.” — Vanessa Cronin, Amazon Editor

“ Heat 2  tees up intricately choreographed set pieces. . . that play in the mind’s eye and pump the accelerator with mounting, marauding excitement, marvels of controlled chaos.” — Air Mail

"For those of you who can’t get enough of his 1995 film  Heat , widely and reasonably regarded as his masterpiece, well, now there’s  Heat 2,  a gritty, vivid, 468-page second helping that delivers the goods and also goes to surprising new places.” — Museum of Moving Images

“Michael Mann’s Heat is one of my all-time favorite movies. Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner’s Heat 2 is now one of my favorite suspense novels. The voice of this book is a brilliant melding of the way we talk and the way we think. I must confess I did put the novel down occasionally, but only because I didn’t want it to end. I’m already quoting lines from Heat 2 to my writer friends (shamelessly saying the lines are mine).” — James Patterson

“ Heat 2 is a brilliant and riveting novel with rich and real characters and powerhouse storytelling that represents one of the most authentic evocations of criminals and the cops who hunt them down that I’ve ever read. The first novel from Michael Mann (and Meg Gardiner) is a tour de force that works as a standalone but also honors, deepens, and expands Mann’s iconic film by placing all the key characters in an intricately detailed and emotionally involving new story that takes place before and after Heat .” — Don Winslow

“FANTASTIC!... It’s incredible! Absolutely LOVED IT!” — Jack Carr

"The novel glistens with the cool Mann became famous for in his hip, shiny TV series “Miami Vice,” the great, claustrophobic film “Collateral,” and, of course, “Heat” . . . . I can't wait to experience the next installment." — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"The best novel of 2022 (or any other year) . . . . Mann orders you to see what he sees and, if you've watched any of his movies, the connection between his words and his signature filmmaking is instant. If you haven't watched any of his movies, you'll end up wanting to." — SF Gate

“ Heat 2 gives us an exciting, emotionally rich thriller, with just as much style and panache as Michael Mann's original classic heist movie. I loved it.” — Adrian McKinty, #1 international bestselling author

“Awesome! This novel is a stunning achievement in character study, narrative form and action. I am in awe. A stunning page-turner every bit as masterful as the original movie. Easily one of the finest novels of the year!” — Steve Cavanagh, #1 international bestselling author

" Heat 2 is an action-packed epic reviving beloved characters from a globally celebrated film. It is also a moving meditation on commitment—the rewards and the costs of giving your all. Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner have deepened the legacy of Heat —and given us one hell of a page-turner. A stunning, mammoth achievement." — Bill Beverly, author of Dodgers

"This audacious, powerhouse of a novel brings to the page everything the classic crime film Heat brought to the screen. . . Drawn by Mann and Gardiner with psychological and emotional gravity, the characters live their lives of crime and violence on the edge of a razor. The plot and the set-pieces of shootouts, heists, and crime-scene investigation are nails. The characters’ motives are obsessive. The details of police work and criminal enterprise, precise and revealing. The banter is quick and smart and memorable. And the metaphors and descriptions conjure up vivid, original images worthy of Mann’s best big movies." — Eric Rickstad, New York Times bestselling author 

“[An] action-packed thriller.”  — Denver Post

About the Author

Michael Mann  is a world-renowned director, screenwriter, producer, and one of the most innovative and influential filmmakers in American cinema. Mann has written and directed award-winning television movies and series (including  Miami Vice  and  Crime Story ) and feature films including  Manhunter ,  The Last of the Mohicans ,  Heat ,  The Insider ,  Ali , and  Miami Vice . He has produced numerous feature films, including Academy Award-winner  The Aviator  (directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett) and directed several commercially successful, critically acclaimed projects including the feature film  Collateral  (starring Tom Cruise) and the pilot for the HBO series  Luck  (starring Dustin Hoffman). Mann has won many prestigious awards, including a BAFTA for Best Film ( The Aviator ), a Golden Globe for Best Picture/Drama ( The Aviator ), and an NBR Award for Best Director ( Collateral ). Mann lives in Los Angeles.

Meg Gardiner  is the author of sixteen acclaimed, award-winning novels. Her thrillers have been bestsellers in the U.S. and internationally and have been translated into more than twenty languages.  China Lake  won an Edgar Award and  UNSUB , the first in Gardiner’s acclaimed UNSUB series, won a Barry Award. Her third UNSUB novel,  The Dark Corners of the Night , has been bought by Amazon Studios for development as a television series. A former lawyer, three-time  Jeopardy!  champion, and two-time president of Mystery Writers of America, Gardiner lives in Austin, Texas. 

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Morrow (Aug. 9 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062653318
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062653314
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 635 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.24 x 3.68 x 22.86 cm
• #386 in Heist Thrillers
• #642 in TV, Movie & Game Tie-In Fiction
• #762 in International Mystery & Crime (Books)

About the authors

Meg gardiner.

Meg Gardiner is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of seventeen thrillers. Her latest is Shadowheart, featuring FBI profiler Caitlin Hendrix. The Real Book Spy calls it “A mind-trip of a story.” Booklist says, “As always, the writing is exquisite and the story is perfectly crafted.” UNSUB, the first novel in the series, won the 2018 Barry Award for Best Thriller. The Dark Corners of the Night was bought by Amazon Studios for development as an hour-long television drama.

Her previous novel, Heat 2, is a prequel/sequel to the film Heat, co-authored with the film’s writer/director, Michael Mann. It debuted at #1 on the NYT best seller list.

Meg is the author of the Evan Delaney series, the Jo Beckett novels, and several stand alones. China Lake won the 2009 Edgar award for Best Paperback Original. The Nightmare Thief won the 2012 Audie Award for Thriller/Suspense audiobook of the year. Phantom Instinct was one of O, the Oprah magazine's "Best Books of Summer."

A graduate of Stanford Law School in California, Meg practiced law in Los Angeles and taught writing at the University of California Santa Barbara. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Michael Mann

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Bill Simmons is a sportswriter, television personality, and podcaster. After many successful years at ESPN as a writer, tv host, and creator (of Grantland & 30 for 30), he signed a lucrative deal to partner with HBO. He currently hosts "The Bill Simmons Podcast", and founded TheRinger.com and Ringer Podcast Network in 2016

SPOILERS: anyone ready to discuss Heat 2?

Book Review: ‘Loving Sylvia Plath’ attends to polarizing writer’s circumstances more than her work

The Associated Press

July 8, 2024, 2:44 PM

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A popular form of writing nowadays is one that involves reexamining the lives of people, often members of marginalized groups, who have otherwise been flattened or short-changed by history.

How has society’s assumptions or prejudices informed how a person is remembered, many authors are asking, and what information is available to us that may tell a more complete story?

These are the questions Emily Van Duyne, an associate professor at Stockton University, asks in “Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation.”

In the wake of Plath’s death by suicide, her husband and fellow writer Ted Hughes constructed a narrative that he was the “stabilizing factor” in his wife’s life but that, in the end, even he couldn’t save her. But Van Duyne rejects any notion that Plath was a bad mother or merely a morbid poet. She maintains Plath ought to be remembered as a complicated woman, a formidable writer — one who outshined Hughes — and almost certainly a victim of domestic abuse.

This book is not, for the most part, a hermeneutic study or close reading of Plath’s writings. Rather, Van Duyne’s source material for this reclaimed portrait of Plath are her circumstances.

Van Duyne seeks to subvert Hughes’ narrative of Plath’s life and what drove her to end it. In the wake of #MeToo and cultural conversations about believing women, Van Duyne argues Plath’s story ought to be given a fresh look.

Those wanting a primer on reading Plath or a comprehensive biography should look elsewhere to the plethora of extant literature on the enigmatic literary giant. But “Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation” should be seen as supplementary material for those seeking to better understand the circumstances surrounding her final years.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

Copyright © 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.

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