When Abby's first letter arrives at a small school in Afghanistan, Sadeed Bayat is chosen to be her pen pal...well, kind of. He is the best writer, but he is also a boy, and in his village it is not appropriate for a boy to correspond with a girl. So his younger sister dictates and signs the letter, until Sadeed decides what his sister is telling Abby isn't what he'd like Abby to know. As letters go back and forth between Illinois and Afghanistan,...

In 1937, during the Depression, fifteen-year-old Mary Alice, initially apprehensive about leaving Chicago to spend a year with her fearsome, larger-than-life grandmother in rural Illinois, gradually begins to better understand and admire her grandmother's unusual qualities.

A boy recounts his annual summer trips to rural Illinois with his sister during the Great Depression to visit their larger-than-life grandmother.

A mayoral candidate's brother is released from prison 25 years after pleading guilty to the murder of his girlfriend, a situation that leads to the re-opening of the case.

A chronicle of the events experienced by a rather magical 17-year-old, who has an overwhelming urge to cut school one spring day and head for downtown Chicago with his girl and best friend to see the sights and experience a day of freedom.

Stubbornness has landed private eye V.I. Warshawski in big trouble at her Chicago office. With her grand old Loop building set to be razed, she's become a hold-out tenant amid frayed wiring and scary, empty corridors. Then she finds a homeless woman with three kids in the basement, and before she can rescue them, they disappear. Worst of all, she's been implicated in a murder—after the body of Deirdre Messenger, a prominent lawyer's wife,

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Oscar Starling never wanted to come to Chicago. But then Oscar finds himself not just in the heart of the big city but in the middle of a terrible fire! No one knows exactly how it began, but one thing is clear: Chicago is like a giant powder keg about to explode. An army of firemen is trying to help, but this fire is a ferocious beast that wants to devour everything in its path, including Oscar! Will Oscar survive one of the most famous and devastating...

A once-respected college professor and novelist, Dale Stewart has sabotaged his career and his marriage — and now darkness is closing in on him. In the last hours of Halloween he has returned to the dying town of Elm Haven, his boyhood home, where he hopes to find peace in isolation. But moving into a long-deserted farmhouse on the far outskirts of town — the one-time residence of a strange and brilliant friend who lost his young life in a

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"Watch your brother," Beth Cappadora tells Vincent, 7. Five minutes later she returns, "Where is Ben?" It is the moment every parent fears and it arrives to a mother of three in Chicago. The novel follows the family as year after year the hope of finding Ben recedes. Nine years later a boy knocks on their door looking for lawn work. It can't be. It is.

Popular television personality Valerie Adler turns to her long-forgotten, Illinois hometown friend Addie Downs when she runs into a bit of trouble involving betrayal and loyalty, family history and small-town secrets.