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THE SEQUEL TO HEAT IS HERE, AND, YES, IT’S A BOOK

Director Michael Mann spent a good part of the early pandemic pivoting to a side hustle. The man responsible for some of the grittiest takes on masculinity committed to celluloid (The Last of the Mohicans, Miami Vice, Collateral) did not start an Etsy shop. He conjured the follow-up to his

1995 crime masterpiece, Heat, not as another film but as an almost 500-page book. At age

79, Mann became a novelist. (He wrote Heat 2 with thriller savant Meg Gardiner.) The hefty tome, which begins immediately after the movie ends, is both a prequel, diving into the early lives of Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), and Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), and a sequel, exploring the aftermath of cops and robbers sinking even deeper into selfactualization—in Mann’s universe, talented cops and talented thieves have a lot in common.

Will there be an onthe-screen sequel to a movie that has had a profound influence on everything from Grand Theft Auto to most of Christopher Nolan’s filmography? Mann says that’s the idea: to do a huge movie. But for now there’s this hardboiled, cinema-like read, which moves as fast as a well-planned heist.