The novel
Heat 2 starts one day after the events of the film, with a wounded Chris Shiherlis [played by Val Kilmer in
Heat] desperate to escape LA. The story moves to both the six years preceding the heist and the years immediately following it, featuring new characters and new worlds of high-end professional crime, with highly cinematic action sequences. The venues range from the streets of L.A. to the inner sanctums of rival Taiwanese crime syndicates in a South American free trade zone, to a massive drug cartel money-laundering operation just over the border in Mexico, and eventually to Southeast Asia.
Heat 2 explores the dangerous workings of international criminal organizations with full-blooded portraits of its male and female inhabitants.
A key is a deep dive into the life of Hanna, six years earlier, in Chicago and signature cases that honed his skills. It includes the failing of his earlier marriage, the effects of his Marine Corp service in Vietnam and conflicts within the Chicago PD where he discovers his life's calling – the pursuit of armed and dangerous felons into the dark and wild places that would doom his marriage in
Heat. In Chicago, that included the hunt for a particularly vicious crime crew.
The book also covers the lives –six years before the bank heist — of master thieves McCauley and Shiherlis, whose character becomes central in the post-1995 world of
Heat, as well as Charlene (Ashley Judd), Nate (Jon Voight), Trejo (Danny Trejo) and the wheelchair-bound Kelso (Tom Noonan), who provided the bank alarm schematics to McCauley in the film.
deadline.com
