Photo above: An almost-noir photo of Hull House in 1941, courtesy of the Chicago Tribune.

Since publishers consider any excerpt on a web page to be “already published,” you’ll get teasers and tidbits and fun stuff here, instead of excerpts while I shop it around.

A Knife in Chicago

(Jane Club Irregulars book 1)

Lucy McClintock arrives in Chicago in 1891 to take a teaching job at Hull House, while also searching for her missing father. She talks to tramps living near the railroad tracks, asking whether they’ve seen him. Thousands of homeless men arrive in Chicago looking for jobs in the slaughterhouses, or doing brute force excavation work for the Sanitary Canal, or building the Columbian Exposition on the mudflats by Lake Michigan. Some of the men  in the hobo camps are returning from the gold and silver mines in Colorado, where they hoped for a “lucky strike.” Since this is where her father was headed the last time she saw him, she thinks one of them may know where he is.

Lucy finds allies and friends in the women who live at the Jane Club, a boarding house owned by Hull House. Her life changes course when a blackmailer overhears her asking about her father. He threatens to blacken her name at Hull House, claiming he knew her father and that he stole from him.

Trying to get the police to take a missing child seriously, Lucy encounters a handsome policeman who doubts her motives. Should she tell him about the blackmailer, or try to deal with him by herself?

Then the child’s mother is found dead, and Lucy and her friends must work with the police to prevent yet another coverup by the corrupt cops working for the gangs.