Category: mystery

• August 11, 2017

  Are You Sleeping by Kathleen Barber

  Kathleen Barber’s thriller Are You Sleeping? (Gallery Books 2017; $26) tells the story of  Josie Buhrman who thought she had put the trauma of her early life behind her, when a hit investigative podcast about her father’s murder brings the past back, compelling her return to the small Illinois town of Elm Park where she…
• August 6, 2017

  Hauntings of the Underground Railroad: Ghosts of the Midwest

  Before the Civil War, a network of secret routes and safe houses crisscrossed the Midwest to help African Americans travel north to escape slavery. Although many slaves were able to escape to the safety of Canada, others met untimely deaths on the treacherous journey—and some of these unfortunates still linger, unable to rest in peace.…
• August 6, 2017

  Journalist Fiona Barton keeps suspense going with ‘The Child’

  As a journalist, Fiona Barton investigated crimes, attended trials and then wrote and filed her stories. But as the author of the just-released “The Child” and her best-selling novel, “The Widow,” both psychological thrillers, Barton had to switch gears. “It sounds ridiculous, but I had to stop being a reporter in order to write a…
• July 3, 2017

  Before the Fall: A Riveting Mystery by Noah Hawley

  A Great Beach Read! I wasn’t sure that I’d like Noah Hawley’s “Before the Fall”(Grand Central 2016; $26) because I already knew it involved a plane crash and that didn’t sound too appealing. But this mystery about a rich media titan and his family and friends is so absorbing, I kept turning the pages way after…
• May 21, 2017

  Testimony by Scott Turow

  More than 30 years ago, Scott Turow released his first legal mystery, Presumed Innocent, a best seller that soon had any lawyer with a modicum of writing ability penning novels. Since then, Turow, a Chicago attorney, has continued to specialize in complex, multi-faceted books about the legal scene in scene in Kindle County—think Cook County.…
• May 17, 2017

  Into the Water: A New Thriller by Paula Hawkins

  Paula Hawking, author of the international best-selling The Girl on the Train, which was translated into 40 languages and made into a movie, will be in Chicago next Friday, May 19 to talk about her newest book, Into the Water (Riverhead Books 2017; $A tense, psychological thriller told from the different viewpoints of all those…