Izzy McNeil is hot on the trail of one of Chicago's most notorious gangsters. Not that he realizes the crimson-tressed enchantress, a self-proclaimed "lapsed lawyer," is moonlighting as a private investigator. But when an unexpected run-in trashes Izzy's cover, she's swept into an evil underworld where she is definitely not safe. That is until Izzy receives help from an unlikely source: the ultimate guardian angel. And the last person she ever dreamed she'd see again. Now Izzy is racing from Chicago to Rome, all the while battling personal demons, Mafiosi killers and red hot emergency desires…. A fresh, intelligent, and emotional thriller served up with a snappy repartee and sassy dialogue. Laura Caldwell writes with an assured ease, showing a true sense of style and story, delivering a brilliant and complicated heroine. Red White and Dead can be read quickly, but I'd recommend it be savored slowly. Great book. --New York Times bestselling author, Steve Berry Laura Caldwell, a former trial lawyer, is currently a professor and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. She is the author of eleven novels and one non-fiction book. She is a nation-wide speaker and the founder of Life After Innocence, which helps innocent people begin their lives again after being wrongfully imprisoned. Laura has been published in thirteen languages and over twenty countries. To learn more, please visit www.lauracaldwell.com. When it happened, it happened at night, the way bizarre things often do. For a Sunday, and nearly midnight, the restaurant was buzzing. That's the way Sundays work in Chicago. Often the city is quiet—most people tucked under sheets by 10 p.m., newspapers sprawled on the floor below them. Other times, on a Sunday in June like that night, when the weather plays nice—the occasional puffed cloud skimming across a crystallized blue sky, a sky that gently settles into a soft black without losing the day's warmth— things can get a little raucous. And I'm the kind of girl who likes a raucous Sunday now and again. So even though Rush Street wasn't my usual hangout, if I'd been surrounded by friends at that corner table at Gibsons Bar, the one by the windows that looked onto the street where people still strolled and lights still burned, I would have been very happy. But I wasn't with friends. Dez Romano threw his arm over the back of my stool. Dez, short for Desmond, had dark black hair, even though he was surely a few years past forty, and it curled in pleasing twists, like ribbons of ink around his face. The somewhat thick bridge of his nose was the only coarse thing on Dez Romano's face, and he managed to make that look spectacularly handsome. He was so confident, so lit up with energy that you began to think every man should have such a face. The story I'd been told by John Mayburn, the private investigator I moonlighted for, was that Dez had been named by his mother after a Catholic cardinal whom she admired. The religious connotation hadn't helped. Dez was now the head of his family business, as in the family business. Dez was, as Mayburn had said, "the new face of Chicago's organized crime." Dez smiled at me now. I thought a smile by such a man would be flashy, a surface grin that easily revealed danger underneath. But it was genuine. Or at least it appeared so. I'd been told that, in some ways, Dez was the new kind of Mafia—the kind who had friends from all walks of life around the city, who opted, when possible, for courting rather than strong-arming, who made large donations to charities, not because he or his family business wanted something from them, but simply because every respectable business did so. I returned Dez's smile, thinking that the problem with Dez wasn't his looks and it wasn't that he lacked generosity, whether toward a woman like me, whom he'd met at the bar, a woman supposedly stood up by a flaky friend or toward his associates. The problem was, at least according to the suspicions of the federal government, Dez ran an intricate business, an arm of the Italian Camorra, believed to be more ambitious and more ruthless than the Cosa Nostra faction made famous by The Godfather movies. In other words, Dez was also the old kind of Mafia. He wasn't afraid of strong-arming or something much more violent. No, not at all. "So, Suzanne," Dez said, using the alias I'd given him, "where to from here?" I laughed, looked at my watch. "It's almost midnight. I'd say home is where I'm going from here." "And where is home?" "Old Town," I answered vaguely. I really did live in Old Town. When Mayburn first taught me to assume a cover name in order to conduct surveillance, he told me to always blend in some reality— some truth that couldn't be easily tied to your real life—or otherwise you'd forget or confuse yourself, and you could land in some very real trouble. The blending of such truths hadn't exactly helped. My occasional moonlighting gig for M