Disaffected teenager Laney has no one in the world but the older Delilah. When the police start asking Laney questions, she finds herself reconstructing a story of suspense, deceit, and revenge... a story that links her to the sadder-but-wiser Miss Baby, seven hundred miles away in Texas.

Rani Kelkar never lied to her parents-- until she meets Oliver. The same qualities that draw her in-- his tattoos, his charisma, his passion for art-- make him her mother's worst nightmare. When Oliver's troubled home life unravels, he starts to ask more of Rani than she knows how to give. When a twist of fate leads Rani from Evanston, Illinois to Pune, India for a summer, she has a reckoning with herself... and what's really brewing beneath the...

Lila Macapagal breaks up with her chef boyfriend and moves home to Shady Palms, IL, to help her aunt, Tita Rosie, with her Filipino restaurant. She starts dating her high school boyfriend, Derek Winter, but soon learns he is the notorious food critic who tried to ruin the restaurants in town, including Tita Rosie's. When he keels over while he and his stepfather, the restaurant's landlord, are dining at the restaurant, Lila thinks he's playing a prank....

In the quaint Illinois town of Partonville, 88-year-old Dorothy and a colorful cast of townsfolk are all aflutter about a former resident's return, a mini-mall naming contest, and a spirited mayoral campaign.

It's election season in corrupt Cook County, Illinois--where the dead vote on who lives and who dies ... A skeleton's hand spills out of an abandoned grain silo, aiming an axe at the candidate for US senate. A heavily-disguised woman hires Chicago private investigator Dek Elstrom to head west to find men with no pasts--and one with no present. While he's away, someone dead comes calling to frame him for murder. A sheriff's deputy wants Dek arrested....

The Yada Yada Prayer Group seems invincible--until tension and distrust shake its very foundation. Jodi Baxter is slowly recuperating from a horrific car accident, but before she's fully recovered, other problems arise within the Yada Yada Prayer Group--big problems. The turmoil starts when a heroin-addicted woman charges into a prayer meeting with a knife and isn't afraid to use it. Things really take a turn for the worse when grim accusations are...