Ellie Foreman

When an elderly stranger, Ben Sinclair, watches Ellie's "Celebrate Chicago" cable television show and dies suddenly not long after, Ellie receives a letter from Ben's landlady, who's found Ellie's name on a scrap of paper among Ben's possessions. Agreeing to help dispose of his effects, but not knowing of any connection, Ellie begins to piece together Ben's story from the books and wartime relics he's left behind. Ellie's search for clues takes her on a dangerous, winding trail from the political present of the North Shore to buried memories of the city's ethnic neighborhoods and steel mills, an illicit love affair, Nazi-era intrigue, and more than one murder thrown in.

The big news story in Chicago is the murder trial of Johnny Santoro, a dock worker whose girlfriend has been killed. Most Chicagoans are betting on a quick guilty verdict, but Ellie Foreman has doubts about his complicity-Santoro is strangely familiar to her. Checking back to the outtakes of a video project in progress while the murder took place, Ellie finds evidence that could save Santoro from a lifetime behind bars. It seems the perfect alibi, but the tape is compromised by radio interference and Santoro goes to jail. Almost immediately, Ellie's world begins to shift: a suspicious vehicle follows her, the Chicago mob shows up, and the FBI wants to question her. She doesn't have answers, but she has questions of her own about the radio transmissions. Everything indicates that someone wants something from her, something bigger than the Santoro case. If only she could figure out what it is...

Chicago filmmaker Ellie Foreman is back, and she's tackling her most dangerous case yet in this dark amateur sleuth thriller. An Image of Death sees Ellie in the midst of producing another video documentary, financed by a successful Chicago real estate developer. But things take an unexpected turn one winter night when a mysterious package arrives anonymously on Ellie's doorstep. Inside, she finds a surveillance video apparently showing the murder of a young woman. Who was the victim, why was she murdered, and what is her connection to Ellie? Despite being pushed to one side by the cops, Ellie begins to uncover the victim's dark history, forged in Eastern Europe at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her search for answers takes her into the murky world of money laundering and diamond dealing, ultimately ending up at a deserted construction site in the hands of people who believe she knows too much...

In this fourth crime thriller of the Ellie Foreman series, the Chicago documentary filmmaker finds herself in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Returning from a video shoot at the Lodge, a newly renovated, upscale resort, Ellie befriends a woman who claims her ride abandoned her at a highway rest stop. But Ellie's kindness is brutally cut short when a pickup truck pulls up, the rear window opens, and the woman is shot dead. Even with her history of sleuthing, Ellie is not eager to get involved. Then the victims' family arrives and begs for information. When the second shooting occurs, Ellie decides to poke around on her own. She is soon drawn into the history of a wealthy and prominent family, deeply rooted in a magnificent mansion on the shores of the lake, and surrounded by an elaborate web of lies, murder, and family secrets that have plagued both them and the town for years-secrets that now place Ellie in the crosshairs of a killer.

Chicago video producer Ellie Foreman has been absent from thriller author Libby Fischer Hellmann's repertoire for almost a decade. Now, in Jump Cut, she's back...and is soon entangled in a web of espionage, murder, and suspicion that threatens to destroy what she holds most dear. Hired to produce a candy-floss profile of Chicago-based aviation giant Delcroft, Ellie is dismayed when company VP Charlotte Hollander trashes the production and cancels the project. Ellie believes Hollander was spooked by shots of a specific man in the video footage. But when Ellie arranges to meet the man to find out why, he is killed by a subway train before they can talk. In the confusion, she finds a seemingly abandoned pack of cigarettes with a flash drive inside that belonged to the now-dead man. Ellie gets the drive's contents decrypted, but before long discovers she's under surveillance. Suspecting Delcroft and the ambitious Hollander are behind it, she's unconvinced when Hollander tells her the dead man was a Chinese spy. Ellie and her boyfriend, Luke, try to find answers, but they don't realize how far they have ventured into the dangerous echelons of hidden power-- where more lives are on the line―including their own.