Private detective Michael Kelly is hired by his former partner to solve an eight-year old rape and battery case long gone cold. But when the partner turns up dead, Kelly enlists a team of his savviest colleagues to connect the dots between the recent murder and the cold case it revived: a television reporter whose relationship with Kelly is not strictly professional; his best friend from childhood, a forensic DNA expert; and an old ally from the DA's office. To close the case, Kelly will have to face the mob, a serial killer, his own double-crossing friends, and the mean streets of the city he loves.

For all the wrong reasons, a national spotlight is shining on Chicago. The city has become known for its violence, police abuse, parent and teacher unrest, population decline, and mounting municipal and pension debt. The underlying problem, contend Ed Bachrach and Austin Berg, is that deliberative democracy is dead in the city. Chicago is home to the last strongman political system in urban America. The mayor holds all the power, and any perceived checks on mayoral control are often proven illusory. Rash decisions have resulted in poor outcomes. The outrageous consequences of unchecked power are evident in government failures in elections, schools, fiscal discipline, corruption, public support for private enterprise, policing, and more. Rather than simply lament the situation, criticize specific leaders, or justify an ideology, Bachrach and Berg compare the decisions about Chicago’s governance and finances with choices made in fourteen other large U.S. cities. The problems that seem unique to Chicago have been encountered elsewhere, and Chicagoans, the authors posit, can learn from the successful solutions other cities have embraced. Chicago government and its citizens must let go of the past to prepare for the future, argue Bachrach and Berg. A future filled with demographic, technological, and economic change requires a government capable of responding and adapting. Reforms can transform the city. The prescriptions for change provided in this book point toward a hopeful future: the New Chicago Way.

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

Traffic Tickets—What a Pain Every police officer is issued a traffic summons book when he is assigned to a district. The supervisors have what we used to call a quota on tickets issued. When an officer is assigned to the traffic division, he is expected to write at least eight moving violations a shift. But that is all he has to do; he doesn’t handle any crime scenes or domestic disturbances or whatever else comes along. On occasion, he has to handle a traffic accident, but that’s about all. Don’t get me wrong. I hated to write tickets, especially moving violations like red lights, speeding, or no left turn. Parking tickets were also a pain in the ass; all they accomplish is that the poor soul that gets the ticket now hates you. I guess that they are a necessity though, and maybe in some way they help keep drivers from getting too crazy behind the wheel of their car or truck. Personally, I would rather be out in the street locking up bad guys and harassing gang bangers. Some of these traffic guys really like working traffic, giving out their quota of summons, and putting a few drunk drivers in jail before they kill somebody or themselves. People that get stopped by the police for a traffic violation really come up with some original excuses. I remember an elderly lady that we stopped for driving the wrong way on a one-way street. This violation is usually an open-and-shut case. When I asked her for her driver’s license and explained why we had stopped her, she called me a liar and asked why wasn’t I out chasing down dope dealers or communists instead of bothering a woman alone in a car trying to get home. 20 DON HERION No matter what I said to her, she had a look of hate in her eyes; and if she had a gun, she would have shot me dead. When I began opening the summons book to write her the ticket, she pulled an acting job on me that was a beauty. The first thing she did was to roll her eyes up in her head and then grab her heart like she was going to have a heart attack right there. Well, needless to say, she hit the right button and her act worked. Even though I knew she was probably faking it, I didn’t want to take a chance of her dropping dead in front of me. I asked her if she needed an ambulance or wanted to be taken to the nearest hospital. She said that she only lived two blocks from there and that her heart pills were in her bathroom. She explained that if she got them, she was sure to be OK. Well, at this point, I was pretty aggravated and couldn’t imagine myself giving this wacky broad mouth-to-mouth resuscitation if she was telling the truth. Of course, I told her that we would be glad to drive her home if she couldn’t drive. She said no, that she felt better, and she thought that she could drive home OK. I said, “OK, lady, under the circumstances, I won’t give you a ticket this time but that you had better be more alert in the future.” I just knew that I made this old broad’s day when she thought she really bullshitted me about the heart attack. To top it off, when she was driving away, she winked at me and said, “Thanks, Officer, have a nice day.” The best part of all is when I got back in the squad car, my partner Bob was just shaking his head and laughing. It seems that he had stopped this old witch in the past for doing the same thing and she pulled the heart attack routine on him too. He admitted that he didn’t want to take a chance and have the old broad drop dead on him either and gave her a pass. The thing that got him was when her eyes went up in her head and all he could see was the whites of her eyes. Later on, we talked to a few of the other guys that were working in that part of the district, and they all had stopped her for doing the same thing, driving the wrong way on a one-way street. They all witnessed her heart attack routine, and none of them gave her a ticket. I thought, your day will come, you old bitty. Not only will I give her a ticket,

The “compelling” story behind the 1995 Chicago weather disaster that killed hundreds—and what it revealed about our broken society (Boston Globe). On July 13, 1995, Chicagoans awoke to a blistering day in which the temperature would reach 106 degrees. The heat index—how the temperature actually feels on the body—would hit 126. When the heat wave broke a week later, city streets had buckled; records for electrical use were shattered; and power grids had failed, leaving residents without electricity for up to two days. By July 20, over seven hundred people had perished—twenty times the number of those struck down by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Heat waves kill more Americans than all other natural disasters combined. Until now, no one could explain either the overwhelming number or the heartbreaking manner of the deaths resulting from the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Meteorologists and medical scientists have been unable to account for the scale of the trauma, and political officials have puzzled over the sources of the city’s vulnerability. In Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg takes us inside the anatomy of the metropolis to conduct what he calls a “social autopsy,” examining the social, political, and institutional organs of the city that made this urban disaster so much worse than it ought to have been. He investigates why some neighborhoods experienced greater mortality than others, how city government responded, and how journalists, scientists, and public officials reported and explained these events. Through years of fieldwork, interviews, and research, he uncovers the surprising and unsettling forms of social breakdown that contributed to this human catastrophe as hundreds died alone behind locked doors and sealed windows, out of contact with friends, family, community groups, and public agencies. As this incisive and gripping account demonstrates, the widening cracks in the social foundations of American cities made visible by the 1995 heat wave remain in play in America’s cities today—and we ignore them at our peril. Includes photos and a new preface on meeting the challenges of climate change in urban centers “Heat Wave is not so much a book about weather, as it is about the calamitous consequences of forgetting our fellow citizens. . . . A provocative, fascinating book, one that applies to much more than weather disasters.” —Chicago Sun-Times “It’s hard to put down Heat Wave without believing you’ve just read a tale of slow murder by public policy.” —Salon “A classic. I can’t recommend it enough.” —Chris Hayes

"Hartfield begins with the early life of her mother, Day Shepherd. Born to a wealthy British plantation owner and the mixed-race daughter of a former slave, Day negotiates the complicated circumstances of plantation life in the border country of Louisiana and Mississippi and, as she enters womanhood, the quadroon and octoroon societies of New Orleans. Equally a tale of the Great Migration, Another Way Home traces Day's journey to Bronzeville, the epicenter of black Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century. We relive crucial moments in African American history as they are experienced by the author's family and others in Chicago's South Side black community, from the race riots of 1919 and the Great Depression to the murder of Emmett Till and the dawn of the civil rights movement."--BOOK JACKET.

In this striking debut collection, characters find unexpected moments of profound insight while navigating daily life. "Clouther’s first collection of stories shows an 'old' talent—meaning, his sophistication in treatment and technique and his wise observations of the human condition have the feel of an author who has the experience of several story collections behind him."—Booklist, starred review "Sharply observed."—Toronto Star "The 10 entries in Clouther’s debut collection all display a sure–handed grasp of craft."—Publishers Weekly In this striking debut collection, characters find unexpected moments of profound insight while navigating the monotony of daily life. Here we find a man who drives to the wrong mountain, a hubcap cleaner who moonlights as a karaoke star, and a deliveryman whose urgent letters have no willing recipient. While lulled by the deceptively simple rhythm of the ordinary, Kevin Clouther offers the instant before momentous change—the view over the cliff, the intake of breath before a decision, a glimpse of stark vulnerability, of faith and hope.