Author Harvey, in this followup to his “Chicago Story” debut thriller featuring PI Michael Kelly, uses two MacGuffins, or plot devices, to move this traipse into dark corridors of power and obscurity toward intense personal danger. But his hardnose, lunch-loving detective lives for the thrill of righting wrongs, however long ago committed or by what threatening forces.

When old flame Janet Woods shows up in Kelly’s office with facial bruises than can only mean she’s a punching bag for her husband’s fists, his first reaction is to have a heart-to-heart with hubby Johnny Woods and put the fear of imprisonment in him. The impulsive idea is rejected by the client, but Kelly takes the case.

From ace newsman Fred Jacobs, a man with two Pulitzers, Kelly learns more about the battering husband than he got from the wife. Johnny Woods, it turns out, works in City Hall, in the mayor’s sanctum–on the Fifth Floor. On the payroll, if you checked Woods out, he’d show up as some PR flack. But the real job that he performs is to fix problems for the leader of the city which, as a thick six foot three-er, means he has some muscle for the work, and a taste for violence.

No noir thriller is complete without a woman in the P.I.’s life, and the one Kelly ran into (as in early-morning jogging) some months ago is a honey. She’s Rachel Swenson, a sitting judge for the Northern District of Illinois (and she’ll play a role in the case). It’s been a year since that meet and his intention to call her has probably cooled her interest. The lapse had to do with his grief over the still vivid loss of his wife Nicole. But increasing thoughts of Rachel tells him it’s time, now, for a resumption of that part of his life.

Following “fixer” Johnny in a Checker cab soon after he catches up with Rachel, Kelly arrives at a charming cottage in an old-money neighborhood. Kelly watches as Woods approaches the front door of the house and, finding it unlocked, enters–only to rush out seconds later, obviously spooked. When Kelly checks the cottage out for himself he finds an old man, hanging. Dead. The mouth of the corpse is stuffed with sand. The man is later identified as Patrolman Richard Bellinger who occupied the cottage since it was miraculously saved in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Kelly probes into the history of the fire, he learns of a scandal surrounding it–one that suggests this house’s survival was no accident of fate. It may, instead, be pointing to a conspiracy between two eminent families of the time with a direct connection to a case of arson, which may have been intended as a means of pushing Irish immigrants out of the city.

From the article in the paper about the hanging man, Kelly turns to the police covering the case and picks up one more interesting detail about the fire and the Bellinger cottage. After the fire had passed, any trace of one significant item was gone. It was a first edition of “Sheehan’s History of the Chicago Fire,” about which further clues indicate has something to do with a missing artifact dating back to Abraham Lincoln. This is the second line of investigation.

The deepening trails of obfuscation lead Kelly to an intense meeting with the mayor, that confrontation with Johnny he’d been thirsting for, a curator expert on the missing volume, and to Janet’s fourteen year-old daughter who has a connection to it and to Kelly, as well.

All in all, a complex mystery to keep your scalp in a tizzy as we go on this dangerous journey into dark corridors of criminal abberation that have been masked behind authority and position. Through his intrepid hero, Harvey breaks down the cloth of obscurity and composes a gripping tale in a style that has Dashiell Hammett looking down with approbation.