Marking his debut as novelist, director Michael Mann will release a literary follow-up to his legendary crime film, Heat, Deadline reported on Wednesday. Titled Heat 2, the book has been co-authored by Mann and Edgar-winner Meg Gardiner, and will hit the shelves (and presumably also digital formats) on August 9. The announcement came with a special teaser, scored to Moby’s “God Moving Over the Face of the Water,” which famously played in the 1995 crime classic’s final moments.

Mann told Deadline that he’d wanted, "for a long time," to tell more stories in the noir-soaked Los Angeles of the film. The book is set before and after the events of Heat, which concludes with the death of career criminal Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), who is killed by LAPD Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) after a cat-and-mouse chase. In Mann's own words:

“It’s been my intention for a long time to do the further stories of Heat. There was always a rich history or back-story about the events in these people’s lives before 1995 in Heat and projection of where their lives would take them after.”

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Image via Warner Bros.

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Featuring De Niro and Pacino at the peak of their stardom, Mann’s film deliberately kept them apart from each other on screen, building toward a restaurant face-off that remains one of the most iconic scenes in modern cinema. The actors had previously starred in The Godfather Part II (although they didn’t share any scenes, owing to their characters existing in separate timelines), and later in the already-forgotten 2008 thriller Righteous Kill. More recently, they starred together in Martin Scorsese’s crime epic The Irishman.

Heat 2 is the first title from Michael Mann Books, which signed a multi-million dollar deal with HarperCollins imprint William Morrow. The novel starts one day after the events of the film, with Val Kilmer’s Chris Shiherlis—one of McCauley’s crew members—trying to hightail it out of Los Angeles. The action takes place not just in L.A. but also sprawls across Mexico and Southeast Asia.

The book will also offer a deep-dive into the life of Hanna, six years before the events of the film, as he hones his skills as an officer of the law. Hanna was based on the real-life Chicago P.D. detective Chuck Adamson and his pursuit of the real Neil McCauley. Several events shown in the film actually happened. The book will explore Hanna’s failed first marriage, and the effects of his Marine Corp service in Vietnam. It will also feature other members of McCauley’s crew.

“The bank job was not the first time Kelso worked with McCauley, and not the last time he will work with Chris,” Mann teased, making a reference to Tom Noonan’s character in the film. He added:

“When I was writing the film, it was imperative for me to create complete life stories about all the characters and to know everything about them, including Neil McCauley’s early institutionalized years when he lost track of his brother, before he parachuted into the streets, young, angry and dangerous. And, the novel shows a McCauley very much attached and the dramatic events that resulted in his dictum that ‘if you’re making moves on the street, have no attachments, allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner.’”

The book flirts with the theory that Hanna and McCauley were fated to cross paths; although they’d never met before the events of the film, their journeys in the book are intertwined.

Essentially a remake of his 1989 TV film L.A. Takedown, Heat has inspired an entire generation of filmmakers, most notably Christopher Nolan, whose superhero epic The Dark Knight borrows heavily from the film. Mann’s last feature was the notorious box office bomb Blackhat. He is currently working as an executive producer and director on Tokyo Vice, an HBO Max adaptation of Jake Adelstein’s non-fiction book.

You can watch the teaser here. Heat 2 will be released on August 9: