A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. And two inquisitive boys standing precariously on...

Law firm partners Oscar Finley and Wally Figg see a chance for huge financial gain when they learn of a pending class action lawsuit against the makers of Krayoxx, a popular cholesterol-reducing drug suspected of causing heart attacks.

Reluctantly agreeing to help when an old boyfriend asks her to exonerate his mother for the murder of his sister, V. I. Warshawski is forced to confront ugly politics and violent elements in her hometown.

Widowed and in need of a job, Kate Warne convinces Allan Pinkerton that a female detective can go places and do things a male detective cannot. Once hired, Kate becomes skilled at lock-picking and surveillance, but she is best in disguise. She investigates burglaries, bank robberies, embezzlement, counterfeiting, blackmail, and murder. Eventually earning the respect of her fellow detectives, Kate comes up with an ingenious plan to protect President...

Newbery honor book: 1996.

A boy recounts his annual summer trips to rural Illinois with his sister during the Great Depression to visit their larger-than-life grandmother.

Private investigator V. I. Warshawski pits her sleuthing skills against high-level government and financial interests when she investigates Home Free, a homeless advocates' group, financial fraud, and murder.

Popular television personality Valerie Adler turns to her long-forgotten, Illinois hometown friend Addie Downs when she runs into a bit of trouble involving betrayal and loyalty, family history and small-town secrets.

A mysterious child teaches two strangers how to love and trust again. After the loss of her mother and her own battle with breast cancer, Joanna Teale returns to her graduate research on nesting birds in rural Illinois, determined to prove that her recent hardships have not broken her. When a mysterious child who shows up at her cabin, barefoot and covered in bruises, Joanna enlists the help of her reclusive neighbor, Gabriel Nash, to solve the...

As letters flow back and forth--between the prairies of Illinois and the mountains of Afghanistan, across cultural and religious divides--sixth-grader Abby, ten-year-old Amira, and eleven-year-old Sadeed begin to speak and listen to each other.