Illinois Authors

Simon & Schuster, New York : 2008.

Meet Patti Black, the most decorated cop in Chicago. On her ghetto beat, Patti Black redefines the word badass. But her steel-plated exterior -- solitary, stoic, loveless -- belies the wrenching legacy of her orphan childhood. Haunted by the horrifying abuse she suffered at the hands of her foster parents, Patti Black sublimates past torments into a meticulously maintained tough-gal persona. When a series of unrelated cases -- a drug bust gone bad, a mayoral assassination attempt, the murder of a state attorney, the exhumation of a long-concealed body from a tenement basement wall -- all point in Patti Black's direction, she finds herself facing the dark truth: You can't hide from your history, no matter how far into the fog you run. For Patti Black, that history didn't die in the tenement wall; it's alive -- and riding her down.

Doubleday, New York : ©2012.

Twenty-five years after a gruesome murder rocked Chicago, a local newspaper runs an exposé on new evidence in the case, a smear campaign that stirs up bad blood for officer Bobby Vargas and his brother Ruben, a high-ranking detective.

Just before World War II, a petroleum engineer working in Oklahoma holds the key to an internationally sought-after aviation fuel, while in Jerusalem, schoolgirl Saba Hassouneh is freed from a refugee camp and becomes a fearsome Arab nationalist fighter.