A boy recounts his annual summer trips to rural Illinois with his sister during the Great Depression to visit their larger-than-life grandmother.

Young Jethro Creighton grows from a boy to a man when he is left to take care of the family farm in Illinois during the difficult years of the Civil War.

One afternoon, Julia Evarts and her five year old daughter, Gracie, arrive home to find an unexpected gift on the front porch: a homemade loaf of Amish Friendship Bread and a simple note: I hope you enjoy it. Also included are a bag of starter, instructions on how to make the bread herself, and a request to share it with others.

Airline captain Rayford Steele, stunned when over one hundred passengers vanish from his plane in the blink of an eye, quickly realizes the Rapture his wife had been telling him about--an event in which Jesus would return to take his followers to Heaven before they die--had happened and he had been left behind.

In Partonville, a tiny southern Illinois farming town, 87-year-old Dorothy Jean Wetstra is the self-proclaimed town matriarch. She's a regular in the main street cafe, where she helps herself to doughnuts and gossip. And she's a Wild Musketeer on the senior citizens' softball team. Aware of her own limitations, she often asks "the Big Guy" in heaven for help with the town's problems: "Dear Lord, DO SOMETHING!"

Green Town, Illinois is visited by Mr. Dark and his Pandemonium Carnival. Terrifying things begin to happen when two adventurous boys stumble onto the Carnival's deadly and destructive secret.

Wizard Harry Dresden's faced some pretty terrifying foes during his career. Giant scorpions. Oversexed vampires. Psychotic werewolves. It comes with the territory when you're the only professional wizard in the Chicago-area phone book. But in all Harry's years of supernatural sleuthing, he's never faced anything like this: the spirit world has gone postal. All over Chicago, ghosts are causing trouble--and not just of the door-slamming, boo-shouting...

As letters flow back and forth--between the prairies of Illinois and the mountains of Afghanistan, across cultural and religious divides--sixth-grader Abby, ten-year-old Amira, and eleven-year-old Sadeed begin to speak and listen to each other.

A mayoral candidate's brother is released from prison 25 years after pleading guilty to the murder of his girlfriend, a situation that leads to the re-opening of the case.

Entreated to tell his side of the story to a detective who put him in prison a decade earlier for a murder he may not have committed, Oliver Marks describes his past as a Shakespearean actor in college whose rivalry with a castmate escalated in dangerous ways.