The cold-case murder of John Hughes, the son of a Chicago Outfit member suspected of pulling the trigger, and the efforts of a determined detective to unravel a cover-up. A murder that had roiled the city and had been investigated for years had been reduced to a few reports and photographs. What should have been a massive file with notes and transcripts from dozens of interviews was nowhere to be found. Chicago Police Detective James Sherlock could...

Attorney Jason Kolarich is a Midwestern everyman with a lineman's build and an easy sarcastic remark. He's young, intelligent, and driven, but he's also saddled with an overwhelming emotional burden, one that threatens to unravel his own life, and possibly the lives of those around him.

The author of Haunted Illinois visits the criminal history of the Windy City neighborhood where mobsters and murderers plied their trades.
 
In 1929, Chicago gangster Al Capone arranged a special St. Valentine’s Day delivery for his favorite arch enemies: a massacre. Seven North Side mobsters were left dead. Yet random killings and bizarre murders were not unfamiliar in Chicago. Tales of the city’s most

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"As investigators brought out the bagged remains of several dozen young men from a small Chicago ranch home and paraded them in front of a crowd of TV reporters and spectators, attention quickly turned to the owner of the house. John Gacy was an upstanding citizen, active in local politics and charities, famous for his themed parties and appearances as Pogo the Clown. But in the winter of 1978-79, he became known as one of many so-called "sex murderers"...

The author of Haunted Illinois takes readers to the Windy City’s wild west, where criminals from Frank Capone to John Wayne Gacy left their mark. 
 
Blazing from the West Side, the Great Chicago Fire left nothing but ashy remnants of the developing city, leveling its landscape but certainly not its spirit. While the West Side was home to the infamous O’Leary barn, it was also where news of some of

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"Beulah Annan. Belva Gaertner. Kitty Malm. Sabella Nitti. These are the real women of [the musical] Chicago. You probably know Roxie and Velma, the good-time gals of the 1926 satirical play Chicago and its wildly successful musical and movie adaptations. You might not know that Roxie, Velma, and the rest of the colorful characters of the play were inspired by real prisoners held in "Murderess Row" in 1920s Chicago -- or that the reporter who covered...

It was the biggest funeral Chicago had seen since Lincoln's. On May 26, 1889, four thousand mourners proceeded down Michigan Avenue, followed by a crowd forty thousand strong, in a howl of protest at what commentators called one of the ghastliest and most curious crimes in civilized history. The dead man, Dr. P. H. Cronin, was a respected Irish physician, but his brutal murder uncovered a web of intrigue, secrecy, and corruption that stretched across...

"Greg King and Penny Wilson turn the original crime of the century on its head in this riveting exploration of the murder trial of Leopold & Loeb"--

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Jessica’s art-viewing Italian vacation is interrupted by a pair of gunmen who steal a painting and kill a retired police officer in the process. Agreeing to help identify the crooks should they be caught, Jessica returns to Cabot Cove and puts the shocking experience behind her.
Months later, Wayne Simsbury, the stepson of an old friend, comes to her for help. Wayne’s father has been shot to death. Not only has Wayne’s...