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.

The sheriff of Justice, Illinois, is hunting a killer. Women visiting town are being murdered, tourists in nice hotels, money still in their billfolds, jewelry still on the dresser. Quiet kills-they go to sleep and never awaken. The sheriff is not pleased to find the new detective in town, Rae Gabriella, working the case on behalf of one of the families. She's staying in the same hotel as one of the victims-and her looks suggest she could be the next...

Set in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois during May 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Scott Hatcher and his neighborhood must come to terms with the disappearance then discovery and follow-on official death investigation of Scott's wife Marie and their neighbor John Bergman.

Green Town, Illinois is visited by a mysterious Mr. Dark and his Pandemonium Carnival. Terrifiying things begin to happen when two small boys become too curious about things.

In a summer that refuses to end, in the deceiving warmth of earliest October, civil war has come to Green Town, Illinois. It is the age-old conflict: the young against the elderly, for control of the clock that ticks their lives ever forward. The first cap-pistol shot heard 'round the town is dead accurate, felling an old man in his tracks, compelling town elder and school board despot Mr. Calvin C. Quartermain to marshal his graying forces and declare...

When three-year-old Benji is plucked from the security of his home in Nagasaki to live with his American father, Lt. Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, and stepmother, Kate, on their farm in Illinois, the family conceals Benji's true identity as a child born from a liaison between an officer and a geisha. But when the truth about Benji surfaces, it will splinter this family's fragile dynamic, sending repercussions spiraling through their close-knit rural...

After the violent death of his oldest daughter during a terrorist bombing, small town college professor Alan "Woody" Woodhall finds himself standing in the cemetery where she was buried. Woody is convinced that life has taught him all the lessons he has to learn: His wife has left him, and his two remaining daughters have grown up and moved away. Yet a new life, which Woody both longs for and resists, begins with his decision to attend the trial of...

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,...

Edgar Award winning author Theresa Schwegel's fourth novel features a female detective chasing a serial rapist across Chicago, from the westside slums to the glitz of the Loop. Detective Sloane Pearson is new to the Sex Crimes Division but no stranger to being treated like an incompetent blonde by her hardened male co-workers. She's also no stranger to hard-to-crack cases, and her latest is as tough as they come: A rapist is on the prowl, dragging...