chicago (ill.)

Mercedes, a black teen whose Chicago family is rather well-to-do, knows only that her father is an entrepreneur, but when she falls in love and her father forbids her to see her new boyfriend, she learns the truth about the source of her family's wealth.

Amateur sleuth Morgan Taylor becomes involved in a murder investigation when she goes to try out for a part in a Chicago stage production and finds her auditioning partner dead on the floor of the theater bathroom.

Bigger Thomas, the black chauffeur for the wealthy Dalton family, is accused of the murder of the Daltons' daughter Mary. The search for Mary's missing body and Thomas' trial shake the family and the city of Chicago, exposing the fears and prejudices of the late 1940s.

Police officer Dick Urbanski faces a new crisis in Chicago as a new alien virus spreads throughout the city, and gives the infected uncontrollable superpowers.

Hester Merriweather's grandmother gives her a handmade rag doll that proves to be very special indeed. Includes historical background on Chicago's African-American community during the 1930s.

Commander Larry Cole, a tough Chicago cop, thinks he has seen it all, until the drug bust outside the National Science and Space Museum goes wrong, and he learns that 188 people have disappeared from that museum over the years.

Rich Cohen chronicles the experiences he had while growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, focusing on how the friendships he had during that time impacted his life both then and now.

A memoir in which the author, one of the first African-American women at Yale, shares the story of her life growing up poor in Chicago in the 1960s, and tells how the welfare system saved the family by enabling her and her siblings to receive a good education.

Unable to endure the discrimination in his small Mississippi town when he returns home from serving in France during World War I, Flo's father moves the family to Chicago, where jazz symbolizes the freedom he hopes they will find.