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...

Inheriting the Chicago Stars football team, trendy New Yorker Phoebe Somerville knocks heads with Coach Dan Calebow, who resents her meddling as much as she despises his sexist jocularity, until they discover an unlikely attraction for each other.

Photographs and text, along with personal accounts of actual survivors tell the story of the great fire of 1871 in Chicago.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “When it comes to creating character, evoking place, and writing crackling and convincing dialogue, Sara Paretsky has no peer—and Hard Time proves it once again.”—Chicago Tribune

“Terrific . . . expertly plotted . . . This book [is] her best.”—The New York Times Book Review

In an instant, the lives of two women...

Kat may be new in her faith, but she's embraced the more radical implications of Christianity with reckless abandon. She invited a homeless mother and her son to move into the apartment she shares with two other housemates. And she's finally found a practical way to channel her passion for healthy eating by starting a food pantry at the church. But not everyone thinks the food pantry is a good idea. When the woman she thought would be her biggest...

After an argument sends their son's girlfriend into early labor, Reverend Curtis Black and his wife experience a rift between them that may send her into the arms of another man.

Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America₂s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair's brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country's most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who,...

No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way : through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. Among coworkers fighting for...

V.I. Warshawski travels to Kansas to investigate the disappearances of a young film student and a faded Hollywood star, but long-simmering racial tensions stir up more mysteries as the body count rises.

Cris Burks won widespread acclaim for her engaging first novel Silky Dream Girl. Burks' second offering follows the life of a determined girl struggling toward adulthood in 1950s Chicago. The devastating discovery that "Daddy" is not her real father opens a great chasm in Neecey's world and leads to Neecey's abusive mother bringing a succession of no-good men into the home. Nevertheless, as she grows into a woman, the resilient Neecey strives to overcome...