HEAT 2, by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner (HarperCollins, $35)
Call it better late than never. Nearly 30 years after Heat, a violent, neo-film noir and one of the greatest cops-and-robbers movies ever made, its director and screen-writer Michael Mann has delivered us a sequel.
That is the good news. The not-so-great news is that Mann’s sequel is not one of his coolly stylish films, but is a first novel — a pandemic lock-down project, reportedly written only after considerable persuasion from the 79-year-old’s wheeling-and-dealing agent, and with considerable help from lawyer-turned-best-selling-thriller-author Meg Gardiner. Taken together, these are not encouraging facts.
