In the mob-ridden Chicago of 1938, a reform candidate for mayor is gunned down, and Steve Malek, a police reporter for The Tribune, senses the story of a lifetime. Incurring his editors' anger, he ranges far beyond his beat, plunging headlong into a maverick investigation of the murder. In the process, he crosses paths with actress Helen Hayes, future Mayor Richard J. Daley, one-time syndicate kingpin Al Capone, and pitching great Dizzy Dean, traded to the Cubs at the start of the season. Even with the excitement of the World Series, Dean may be the key to Malek's very survival.

1946, the first post-World War II year, finds Tribune police reporter Snap Malek hip deep in a murder case. Someone has stabbed his cousin's British war bride to death in their Bohemian neighborhood home in Pilsen. Snap's rogue investigation takes him into the shadowy blue-collar saloon world of Pilsen, where he encounters a melange of characters, including cynical and hard-bitten factory workers, a tragic war widow, and a former professional prizefighter-all "bar friends" of the murdered woman. Determined, Malek hires the city's best defense attorney for his cousin, encounters legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and deals with the traumatic emotional distraction of reporting on one of the nation's worst-ever train wrecks that rocked the western Chicago suburb of Naperville.

Against the ominous backdrop of America's entry into World War II, the navy still reels from the devastation wreaked at Pearl Harbor and the crushing defeat of US ground troops in the Philippines. On the home front, scientists at the University of Chicago under Enrico Fermi labor feverishly on a secret weapon that promises to reverse the fortunes of battle. However, sinister forces are at work on the outwardly serene Gothic campus, resulting in violent deaths. While work grinds on in the shadowy catacombs beneath an abandoned football stadiumâ work that will forever alter our worldâ Chicago Tribune police reporter Steve Malek delves into the intrigue. Battling for an exclusive story and, ultimately, for his very life, Malek finds himself in the midst of history-in-the-making.

Autumn 1948 the final tense days of the Presidential campaign between incumbent Harry S Truman and Republican challenger Thomas E. Dewey. As Truman prepares for a visit to Chicago, Tribune police reporter Steve Snap Malek is warned of a plan by an anti-Semitic group to assassinate the President because of his recognition of the new state of Israel. This hate group pressures Malek to give them publicity in the Tribune. He demurs, and the menacing organization, calling itself The New Reich, begins killing Chicagoans, one a day, including a policeman and a fireman. They threaten to kill more unless Malek writes about them, although their spokesman, contacting the reporter by phone, refuses his request for an in-person interview. Malek begins his dogged hunt for the people behind The New Reich, along the way meeting maverick automaker Preston Tucker and getting a chance to drive his revolutionary new car. Finally, one week before the election, Truman arrives in Chicago for a parade, and Malek comes face-to-face with the would-be assassin, laying his own life on the line in a desperate attempt to stifle the deadly plot.