A country girl moves to the big city and lives her own version of the American Dream by becoming mistress to the men of her choice and so working her way to fame as an actress.

Sinclair Lewis said of the novel in 1930, "Dreiser's great first novel, Sister Carrie, which he dared to publish thirty long years ago and which I read twenty-five years ago, came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity

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No one really notices that a certain horse race might have been fixed until Matt O'Connor, a Chicago-based columnist for a national racing newspaper, gets a call from Moe Kellman, a horse-owning acquaintance. Kellman's question for Matt: Was the death of ninety-two-year-old Bernard Glockner, Chicago's oldest active bookie, suicide or murder? Glockner was Kellman's late uncle, and Kellman, a man familiar with the Chicago mob, wants Matt to check it...

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...

Sometimes the person you most need is the one least like you. Kathryn Davies is a bright young woman from a prominent Phoenix family. But after making a leap of faith at a Christian music fest, dropping out of med school, and moving to inner city Chicago, her family all but disowns her. When Kat discovers SouledOut Community Church, she longs to become a part of the multicultural church family. But her tendency to immediately say whatever she's thinking...

As the youngest bureau chief and head of the Chicago Police Department's Major Case Squad, Boone Drake seems to have it all under control. Only those closest to him know that just a few short years ago, he lost everything that mattered to him in a tragic accident. After years of healing, his life is back on track. He recently married a wonderful woman named Haeley, adopted her son, bought a beautiful home, and rediscovered his faith. But Boone can't...

In Where Do I Go? by Gold Medallion Award winner Neta Jackson, Gabrielle Fairbanks hopes her move to Chicago will help her find real purpose in life. When she stumbles over a homeless woman and into a job as program director of the House of Hope-a downtown women's homeless shelter-she believes she's found what she's been missing. And then her disgruntled husband threatens to divorce her and take custody of their children unless she quits working at...

Boone Drake is a young cop rising rapidly through the ranks of the Chicago PD. He has a beautiful family, a nice house, a great partner, and a plan to be in the Organized Crime Division within five years. Then everything goes horribly, terribly wrong, and his life spirals out of control. But when he comes face-to-face with a vicious gang leader, Boone realizes that God is a God of second chances and can change the hardest heart.

Maintaining a cordial relationship with the unfaithful Charlotte while planning a divorce when their son graduates from high school, the Reverend Curtis Black resists his wife's efforts to reconcile and considers a proposition by a woman who desperately wants to marry him.

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...

"She promised a dying father she would keep his daughter safe. She can't fail now. The one thing Sylvie Townsend wants most is what she feared she would never have - a family of her own. But taking in Polish immigrant Rose Dabrowski to raise and love quells those fears - until seventeen-year-old Rose goes missing at the World's Fair, and Sylvie's life unravels. With nowhere else to turn, Sylvie seeks help from her boarder and Rose's violin instructor,...