Title: Christmas with Elvis: The Official Guide to the Holidays from the King of Rock ’n’ Roll

Author: Rob Elder

Date: December 12, 2021

Day: Sunday

Time: 2:00-3:30 PM

Description

Celebrate Christmas with the King of Rock n' Roll!

For Elvis, Christmas at Graceland was a time for family and friends, a respite from the road and the recording studio. It was a time to sing gospel songs around the piano and give out extravagant gifts.

In this spirit, Christmas with Elvis is designed like a Christmas party Elvis himself would have liked. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at the iconic music and songs Elvis sang and recorded for his bestselling holiday albums, alongside favorite stories, trivia, and Yuletide cocktails and munchies—all wrapped up with a merry Christmas twist fit for the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. Fully illustrated with color photographs and illustrations throughout.

ELVIS™ and ELVIS PRESLEY™ are trademarks of ABG EPE IP LLC
Rights of Publicity and Persona Rights: Elvis Presley Enterprises, LLC
© 2021 ABG EPE IP LLC
elvis.com

About the Author

Robert K. Elder is the author of 14 books, including Read Your Partner Like a Book, The Mixtape of My Life, and Hidden Hemingway. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the Paris Review, and many other publications. He is the chief digital officer for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the founder of Odd Hours Media. Robert lives and writes in Chicagoland.

Authors Discussion and Signing with Susanna Calkins and Lori Rader-Day

(Indoor Event so Masks are Required.)

Date: December 10, 2021

Day: Friday

Time: 7:00PM

They will discuss their latest Historical Mystery Novels in England from the Renaissance to Restoration London and the 20th Century (They are both Authors & Books described below:

About the Author

Susanna Calkins is the author of the award-winning Lucy Campion mystery series, set from the Renaissance to Restoration London, and the Speakeasy mysteries, set in Prohibition-era Chicago. She has a PhD in history and works at Northwestern University. Born and raised in Philadelphia, she currently lives in the Chicago area with her husband and two sons.

Description

Murder always sells. But when a series of dark and puzzling crimes takes place Renaissance to Restoration LondonLondon, will printer’s apprentice Lucy Campion be publishing the news – or starring in it?

London, 1667. Printer’s apprentice Lucy Campion is unsettled when, on a frozen December morning after church, an elderly woman dressed in mourning clothes whispers an ominous warning in her ear.

Lucy sternly tells herself it’s nonsense, but then her much-loved former master, Magistrate Hargrave, is viciously attacked with a brass hourglass during a break-in. But what exactly was the intruder searching for? And why did they first stop to steal a piece of Cook’s lamb and lentil pie?

The puzzling case is just the start of a series of dark, bizarre crimes. Lucy’s determined to uncover the truth and see that justice is done. But someone is equally determined to stop her – whatever it takes.

This page-turning historical mystery set in Renaissance London is a great choice for readers who like their heroines lively, their mysteries twisty and their historical settings brimming with authenticity.

About the Author

Lori Rader-Day is the author of Death at Greenway, The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, The Day I Died, Little Pretty Things, and The Black Hour. She is a four-time Mary Higgins Clark Award nominee, winning the award in 2016. Lori lives in Chicago.

Description

"Irresistible... a Golden Age homage, an elegantly constructed mystery that on every page reinforces the message that everyone counts." –New York Times Book Review

From the award-winning author of The Day I Died and The Lucky One, a captivating suspense novel about nurses during World War II who come to Agatha Christie’s holiday estate to care for evacuated children, but when a body is discovered nearby, the idyllic setting becomes host to a deadly mystery.

Bridey Kelly has come to Greenway House—the beloved holiday home of Agatha Christie—in disgrace. A terrible mistake at St. Prisca’s Hospital in London has led to her dismissal as a nurse trainee, and her only chance for redemption is a position in the countryside caring for children evacuated to safety from the Blitz.

Greenway is a beautiful home full of riddles: wondrous curios not to be touched, restrictions on rooms not to be entered, and a generous library, filled with books about murder. The biggest mystery might be the other nurse, Gigi, who is like no one Bridey has ever met. Chasing ten young children through the winding paths of the estate grounds might have soothed Bridey’s anxieties and grief—if Greenway were not situated so near the English Channel and the rising aggressions of the war.

When a body washes ashore near the estate, Bridey is horrified to realize this is not a victim of war, but of a brutal killing. As the local villagers look among themselves, Bridey and Gigi discover they each harbor dangerous secrets about what has led them to Greenway. With a mystery writer’s home as their unsettling backdrop, the young women must unravel the truth before their safe haven becomes a place of death . . .

Author: John Good (Local Retired Police Officer)

Title: Blood on the Badge

Date: December 4, 2021

Day: Saturday

Time: 2:00 - 4:00 PM

Author John Good imagined Blood on the Badge after forty years in the law enforcement profession. Mr. Good has extensive training as a Juvenile Officer, Field Training Officer, Bicycle Officer and School Resource Officer. Perfect for readers of crime fiction and cop stories who were also fans of Joseph Wambaugh. Blood on the Badge is a page-turner from its first gunshot to the last. Mr. Good was interviewed by Rick Kogan on his Sunday evening program on WGN Radio 720.

Authors Discussion & Sigining:

James Elsener for Reflections of Valour and The Last Road Trip

Rusell Fee for A Dangerous Remedy: (#1) A Sheriff Matt Callahan Mystery,  A Dangerous Identity: (#2) A Sheriff Matt Callahan Mystery, and  A Dangerous Season: (#3) A Sheriff Matt Callahan Mystery

Date: October 15, 2021

Day: Friday

Time: 5:30 to 7:00 PM

About James Elsener

James Elsener was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in southern Michigan. After high school he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps serving for four and half years on active duty including a tour in Vietnam as a radio operator in an artillery unit. After graduation from Western Michigan University he got his first journalism job as a reporter with the City News Bureau of Chicago and later worked for the Chicago Tribune. He spent 47 years in the newspaper industry as a reporter, columnist, editor, association executive, advertising sales representative and owner/publisher. He is now writing books and living with his wife Patricia in River Forest, Illinois. In his spare time, he plays handball competing in many regional and national tournaments.

Brenda Walker passes slowly by Panel 15-E of "The Wall," the memorial to those who paid the ultimate sacrifice during the Vietnam War. There, etched into the black granite, she spots the name of her college sweetheart, "John Briggs." She had never known his fate until now.  

Stub Rowe’s mediocre major league baseball career ended with a ground out to the second baseman. He considered that to be the wimpiest out in baseball. He had never been a star, but he was considered steady and reliable. Some team always needed a third baseman with a little pop in his bat…until the years ran out on him. Now it was time to consider what to do with the rest of his life. 

About Russell Fee

Russ Fee was born in Indiana but grew up in Washington D.C. and London.  After graduating from the College of William and Mary, he served in the army as an intelligence officer and then became a trial lawyer in Chicago, litigating civil rights and civil liberties cases, before becoming a teacher.  A Dangerous Season is Russ’s fourth novel and the third book in his Sheriff Matt Callahan Mystery Series.  Kirkus Reviews described the first book in the series, A Dangerous Remedy, as “A well-written mystery about a unique community imbued with a palpable sense of place . . . well-plotted and highly enjoyable.”  The second book in the series, A Dangerous Identity, won the Chicago Writers Association’s Book of the Year Award.  Russ and his wife are dual citizens of the United States and Ireland.  They now live in the Upper Midwest, which they love.

After a horrific mutilation renders former Chicago police detective Matt Callahan a recluse, he is given a second chance at life as sheriff of tiny Nicolet County in the Northwoods of Michigan. Idyllic, peaceful, and sparsely populated, the island community hides a web of secrets Callahan and his young female deputy must uncover before a great city an ocean away explodes in violence and is thrown back into a half century of carnage. Irish paramilitaries, the British Royal Family, a century-old Irish enclave in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the long reach of modern terrorism, and the incendiary effect of a single spark on the lasting peace of a nation combine to make a volatile brew in this engrossing Midwest mystery.

WINNER OF THE CHICAGO WRITERS ASSOCIATION BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD (2019) In this award-winning mystery/thriller, the gruesome death of a young woman pulls Sheriff Matt Callahan into a shifting universe where nothing is as it appears. As his island faces the threat of environmental ruin from the rupture of an oil pipeline under the waters of Lake Michigan and secret drilling along its shores, an unseen and relentless force poses a greater peril to the people of the island and beyond. When Callahan attempts to navigate the maze of deception that conceals those responsible for the danger, he unwittingly draws the innocent into a lethal trap and must confront his greatest fear as he is pushed to his physical and emotional limits.

Title: Call Me Z: A Novel of Murder, Corruption & Greed

Authors: Paul Teodo and Tom Myers

Date: August 22, 2021

Day: Sunday

Time: 2:00 PM

Description

Fired from a boutique suburban medical center, senior executive Slavoj Zlobec is blackmailed by his AA sponsor, Father Tommy Monahan, into returning to south side Chicago to save a run-down, struggling hospital. Z, a sixty-year-old in-and-out alcoholic with a disharmonious name and a bucketful of guilt, is no match for the power and influence of Chicago politics. His sole involvement with the legal system was a year spent surviving predatory guards in a juvenile detention center after nearly killing the boy who hung his dog. Nazis, gangbangers, amputees and cooks inhabit this fast-paced tale of greed and murder set during the week of the 2008 Presidential election. CALL ME Z pays tribute to a real-life group of stubborn Eastern European nuns, who refused to abandon the disenfranchised poor their inner-city hospital serves.

The Authors

Paul Teodo is a retired healthcare exec and author. He is a native Chicagoan and noted storyteller. His first book PASTAMAN received strong reviews & his second book Call Me Z.

Tom Myers is a retired Navy Commander who served at sea in numerous ships and in Iraq with the Multi-National Force.

Title: Murder in the Summer of Love

Author: Michael Raleigh

Date: June 17, 2021

Day: Thursday

Time: 6:00 PM

In the summer of 1967, a Florida bookie is found dead in a Chicago motel, a businessman is missing along with a satchel of money, and Private Eye Harry Strummer who we met in Peerless Detective is in the middle of it.

Michael Raleigh is a lifelong Chicagoan and the author of several novels, including the  The Conjurers Boy. He grew up on the north side of Chicago, spending the first 11 years in the neighborhood around old Riverview amusement park, a neighborhood that is the setting for his novel In the Castle of the Flynns.. Also, he has written the Paul Whelan mystery series set in the same area of the city. Murder in the Summer of Love is the second in his new Private Detective Harry Strummer novels after Peerless Detective.also set in Chicago around Wrigley Field and Lake Michigan.

Michael attended DePaul University, where he received a bachelor of arts degree, majoring in English literature, with a minor in American history. He did his graduate work at Michigan State University, where he received a Master’s in English, specializing in Medieval Literature. It was at MSU that he also received training as a teacher of English as a Second Language. . Eventually he went to work for the City of Chicago’s Model Cities Program, an anti-poverty program, doing extensive field work in impoverished neighborhoods. He went back into teaching in 1979, and in 1980 took a position at Truman College in Chicago where, for twenty-eight years he taught English as a Second Language, Freshman composition, Literature, and the History of Chicago (a subject which, over the years, has become a favorite of his and the source of several of his library programs). 

Michael has been a bank teller, a bartender, a grant writer for the Salvation Army, an office manager, a microfiche technician, and a punch press operator. He currently teaches in the Freshman Writing Program at DePaul University, and he writes.

He has been married for over 31 years to his wife Katherine, and they have three children.

Author: Michael A. Black

Titles: A Continuation of  Army Ranger Steve Wolf Series: Devil’s Dance #1, Devil’s Fancy #2, Devil’s Brigade #3, and Devil’s Advocate #4

Date: June 13, 2021

Day: Sunday

Time: 2:00PM