The Innocence Game
Journalist and documentarian Harvey is known for his race-the-clock thrillers starring Chicago private eye Michael Kelly (e.g., The Chicago Way, 2007, and The Third Rail, 2010). This time he offers a stand-alone thriller, still set in Chicago and environs but starring an unlikely trio of journalism grad students. Three students are enrolled in the Medill School of Journalism’s Innocence Seminar. This program has received a great deal of both positive and negative press (in the real world) for having students, guided by a professor, work to exonerate wrongly convicted death-row inmates. Harvey doesn’t mention the controversy surrounding the program, which seems odd since his mystery is set in the present. The students choose their own case, a 14-year-old cold case in which a young boy was murdered. On their visit to the forest-preserve crime scene, they stumble upon another young boy’s body. The trio’s pursuit of both cases is sometimes intriguing but more often improbable. For Harvey fans. --Connie Fletcher