HEART OF CHICAGO

Chicago, 1920s. Everybody wants a piece of the city. Some are about to become something more.

Private investigator Slippery Jimmy makes his living navigating the crooked alleys between Chicago's lawmen and its criminal underworld. He is good at finding things people would rather keep buried.

When whispers of a mysterious gathering draw the city's most powerful gangs to an industrial waste plant, Jimmy follows the trail straight into a nightmare.

A voice comes over the intercom with a promise: Chicago is about to change forever. Any gang that wishes to become the greatest in the city - and learn all its secrets - must find something called the Heart of Chicago.

Then the shooting starts.

Then the plant explodes.

The survivors soon discover that survival came with a price. Strange abilities begin emerging among them, each seemingly shaped by the person carrying it. A boxer's hands become impossibly fast. A gunman's ammunition refuses to run dry. Words acquire frightening power.

The impossible quietly seeps into Chicago's streets, and organized crime realizes it has been handed an entirely new arsenal.

Jimmy refuses to let the mystery go. Someone brought the gangs together. Someone wanted the bloodshed. Whatever the Heart of Chicago is, someone was willing to turn the whole city upside down to find it.

Digging for answers gets Jimmy framed for murder and driven outside the law he once depended upon. He is forced into the same criminal world he spent his career investigating and begins assembling an unlikely group of outcasts.

Among them is Lucy "Loose Lips" Rossi, the grieving daughter of a fallen crime boss struggling to hold together her father's crumbling empire, and Red Hearing, a disgraced reporter whose reputation for lies may prove more dangerous than anyone realizes.

Across the city, gangsters, desperate survivors, and ordinary people caught in the crossfire begin discovering what the explosion has made of them.

Jimmy's rival, Sticky Fingers, recognizes the new reality faster than most: power in Chicago has changed, and the people willing to embrace that change will inherit the streets.

Other stories widen the conflict. Gang patriarch Malone tears through the city searching for his missing son. A desperate young woman named Qwilly Quandry discovers that the impossible may offer one last chance to save her ailing mother. Somewhere beyond the violence, an unseen hand continues moving pieces across the board.

Enemies become allies. Friends become liabilities. Gangsters become legends.

And as the smoke clears over a Chicago that no longer obeys the rules it once did, one question moves from speakeasies to police stations, back alleys to penthouses:

What is the Heart of Chicago?

Nobody knows.

Everybody wants it.

Jimmy and his emerging crew may discover that finding Chicago's Heart requires deciding how much of their own they are willing to lose.

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