The Innocence Game, by Michael Harvey.Knopf. 256 pages.Mystery writers often set their stories in their hometowns. For Michael Connelly it is Los Angeles, for Sara Paretsky, Chicago. The late Stuart K

501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read Before They Die, by Ron Kaplan. University of Nebraska Press, $24.95. “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by lik

Reading Golden: How Rod Blagojevich Talked Himself out of the Governor’s Office and Into Prison, is an excruciatingly painful experience. But the pain does not come from the work of Jeff Coen an

One Shot at Forever: A Small Town, an Unlikely Coach and a Magical Baseball Season, by Chris Ballard. Hyperion, 234 pages.Here in central Illinois we love our high school sports. Granted we also pay a

Scott Turow is one of the foremost courtroom fiction writers in America. Millions have read his books or viewed adaptations of his works. But Turow does more than write about fictional courtrooms. He

During the first days of September, as temperatures across Illinois remain in the 80s, it is difficult to think about the cool weather of fall and the excitement of Thanksgiving weekend when high scho

Midway through Beautiful Piece, an entertaining and gritty novel written in the noir style of mysteries, I began to have an eerie feeling. Imagine, if you will, the look on the face of Bill Murray each morning at 6 a.m. when he awakens to the sound of Cher belting out the lyrics to “I got you babe!” Just as the character portrayed by Murray in Groundhog Day, readers of this novel by Joseph Peterson will find themselves in that perpetual cycle, repeating a snapshot moment of life. In Beautiful Piece, that moment is a hot August day during a brutal heat wave in Chicago when Robert, the narrator, meets Lucy at a gas station and begins a torrid affair that serves as the cornerstone event upon which Peterson constructs his debut novel.

In the 1960 movie version of the H.G. Wells novella The Time Machine, the Time Traveler returns from 19th-century England to the futuristic society he has rescued from evil. Before leaving, he