Melissa Martin

Tess enlists her biological father – a lovable slacker from the wrong side of the tracks – and the charming juvenile delinquent next door to help her come to grips with the death of her little sister.

When a psychiatrist takes a paranoid murderer as a patient, his family is thrown into a nightmare as he unwittingly invites danger into his home.

Dominic works round the clock: nights making biscotti for his family's bakery in a working-class Italian neighborhood in Pittsburgh, then days downtown where he's a specialist in firing people at a company that negotiates mergers. He's thrown for a loop with he learns that Bella, an elderly neighbor who's his family's closest friend, has but a few months to live. All her life, she's saved money in coffee cans for her daughter, Lucca's, wedding, but Lucca is off in foreign lands, initially as a Peace Corps volunteer, and doesn't need a man. Dominic vows to bring Lucca home and convince her to marry him to fulfill Bella's most fervent wish. What will Lucca say?

In just 60 years Chicago grew from a remote, swampy frontier town into one of the most explosively alive cities in the world. Captains of industry built empires through innovation, ingenuity, determination, and sheer ruthlessness, while the labor of millions of working men and women -- most of them immigrants from Ireland and Northern Europe -- helped reinvent the way America did business.