With no money and no husband, Kate Warne finds herself with few choices. The streets of 1856 Chicago offer a desperate widow mostly trouble and ruin--unless that widow has a knack for manipulation and an unusually quick mind. In a bold move that no owther woman has tried, Kate convinces the legendary Allan Pinkerton to hire her as a detective. Battling criminals and coworkers alike, Kate immerses herself in the dangerous life of an operative, winning...

In an instant, the lives of two women collide. One was behind the wheels of a Trans Am she liked to drive too fast. The other was lying in the road, dying an agonizing death. When Chicago private eye V.I. Warshawski gets out of her car to look at the woman she almost hit, she begins a long, harrowing descent into a world of shadowy secrets and tangled lives- and into the grimmest heart of her city. As Warshawski unravels the mystery of...

"When Detective Lauren Medina sees the calling card at a murder scene in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood, she knows the Pied Piper has returned. When another teenager is brutally murdered at the same lagoon where her sister's body was found floating years before, she is certain that the Pied Piper is not just back, he's looking for payment he's owed from her. Lauren's torn between protecting the city she has sworn to keep safe, and keeping a...

"In the sweltering summer of 1915, Pin, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a carnival fortune-teller, dresses as a boy and joins a teenage gang that roams the famous Riverview amusement park, looking for trouble. Unbeknownst to the well-heeled city-dwellers and visitors who come to enjoy the midway, the park is also host to a ruthless killer who uses the shadows of the dark carnival attractions to conduct his crimes. When Pin sees a man enter the Hell...

Private eye V.I. Warshawski knows her friend Consuelo's pregnancy is already risky-she's sixteen and diabetic. Despite V.I.'s efforts to provide Consuelo with proper care, both mother and daughter die in the local hospital. Suspecting malpractice, V.I. begins an investigation- and a reluctant romance with an ER doctor. But deadly complications arise when a series of vicious murders and an attack on a women's clinic lead her to suspect a cold-blooded...

Murder's the thing in this new entry in the Agatha and Macavity award-winning series featuring single-mom sleuth Jane Jeffry. Jane's best friend, Shelley, and her husband buy a run-down theater, and donate it to the drama department of the local university. Shelley decides she'll try out new caterers for her husband's business on the theater's volunteers. She persuades Jane to come along to help judge. It's inevitable that they get to know the cast...

Nuala Anne McGrail, a fey, Irish-speaking woman blessed with the gift of second sight, and her husband and accomplice, Dermot Michael Coyne, investigate the brutal beating of Finnbar Burke, the "nice fella" with whom their shy, golden-haired nanny has fallen in love, who is found floating in the Chicago River. Set in late nineteenth-century Chicago.