By Owen Williams | Posted 8 Jul 2019

It's now getting on for 25 years since the release of Michael Mann's seminal crime classic Heat. Clearly with that anniversary in mind, Mann has targeted a 2020 date to revisit the characters. We're not talking about a film though: this is the director's long-promised novel.

Publicising Blake Howard's One Heat Minute podcast, Mann confirmed that the book will be published next year by HarperCollins, and that he has co-written it with the award-winning and prolific crime writer Reed Farrel Coleman.

A few years back when first announced, we were led to believe that this novel would be a prequel to the events of the movie. So if you ever wondered about the formative years of homicide detective Vincent Hanna (so evocatively brought to life byAl Pacino), criminal Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), and McCauley's accomplices including Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) and Nate (Jon Voight), you might finally be about to learn those histories.

Or it might by now have evolved into something completely different. What we do know is that the Heat-quel marks the second book to be published under Mann's own HarperCollins crime imprint, Michael Mann books, following Elaine Shannon's gripping (factual) Hunting Leroux. That one is available right now.