In this powerful book we enter the world of Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian immigrant who arrives in America fired with dreams of wealth, freedom, and opportunity. And we discover, with him, the astonishing truth about "packingtown," the busy, flourishing, filthy Chicago stockyards, where new world visions perish in a jungle of human suffering. Upton Sinclair, master of the "muckraking" novel, here explores the workingman's lot at the turn of the...

The position of women in a success-oriented society is epitomized by the story of Caroline Meeber, who leaves her small Mid-western hometown in 1889 to start life anew in Chicago and later in New York. In her quest for riches she becomes a famous actress, only to realize that despite her material acquisitions true happiness remains illusory.

"Stubbornness has landed private eye V.I. Warshawski in big trouble at her Chicago office. With her grand old Loop building set to be razed, she's become a hold-out tenant amid frayed wiring and scary, empty corridors. Then she finds a homeless woman with three kids in the basement, and before she can rescue them, they disappear. Worst of all, she's been implicated in a murder -- after the body of Deirdre Messenger, a prominent lawyer's wife, turns...

V.I. accepts a request from an old client to check up on an empty family mansion; subsequently surprises an intruder in the dark; and, giving chase, topples into a pond. Grasping for something to hold on to, her fingers close around a lifeless human hand. It is the body of a reporter who had been investigating events of forty-five years earlier, during the McCarthy era, and V.I.'s discovery quickly sucks her into the history of two great Chicago families-their...

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's novel is just as powerful today as when it was written -- in its reflection of poverty and hopelessness, and what...

PI V. I. Warshawski of Chicago experiences the harrowing world of women's prisons when she is incarcerated after being falsely arrested. It happens while she is probing the murder of an illegal immigrant.

When the corpse of a brutally mutilated murder victim turns up at the time of the full moon, accompanied by some most unusual paw prints, professional wizard and supernatural investigator Harry Dresden finds himself searching Chicago for the werewolf stalking the city.

Anabelle Granger endeavors to promote her grandmother's matchmaking business by landing sports agent Heath Champion as a client, an effort that is challenged by Heath's arrogant nature and Annabelle's own unexpected feelings.

Chicago's unique brand of ball is sixteen-inch slow pitch, played in leagues all over the city for more than a century. But in politics, in business, and in law enforcement, the game is hardball. When V. I. Warshawski is asked to find a man who's been missing for four decades, a search that she figured would be futile becomes lethal when secrets from the city's racially charged history rise up to brush her back from the plate with a vengeance.

Nine stories on PI V.I. Warshawski of Chicago, mostly involving friends and family. In one, at the request of an Italian cousin she searches for sheet music which belonged to her mother, in another a friend asks her aid in recovering a stolen family sculpture.