Concept Projects

After decades with the Chicago Police Department, Joe Soderstrom is ready for something quieter. When his wife lands a career-making position at a hospital in the small southern Illinois town of Wood Grove, Joe happily trades the city for a slower life and a job with the local police department.Then human remains are discovered at the bottom of Wood Grove Lake during the first open-water exercise of a newly formed scuba class.The discovery resurrects a murder that has haunted the town for more than fifty years - and leads investigators straight to the Soderstroms, a notorious local family Joe has never heard of. They share his unusual last name. They share his Hispanic heritage. And, unsettlingly, they look like him.What Joe initially dismisses as coincidence becomes impossible to ignore when he discovers that his recently deceased father, Daniel, grew up in Wood Grove - a chapter of his life he never once mentioned.As long-buried secrets begin surfacing, Joe is forced to question everything he believed about the man who shaped him. Was his father the honorable man Joe spent his life trying to emulate - or was that identity built around a lie?

Brianna and Bethany have spent their teenage summers on the roof outside Brianna’s attic bedroom, sharing the things they can’t tell anyone else beneath the night sky. Their only rule: what’s discussed on the roof stays on the roof -between them and the moon.As graduation approaches, both girls are desperate for something to change. Brianna is facing a mother eager to push her out the door the moment she turns eighteen. Bethany lives in a beautiful home where everyone has gotten very good at pretending everything is fine. While the girls dream about leaving their small Illinois town behind, secrets buried within their families begin forcing their way into the open.A decades-long compulsion. A marriage quietly unraveling. A mother ready for freedom. And two best friends discovering that the families they were born into may not be the families they ultimately choose.All Brianna has ever wanted is a different life. So beneath every full moon, she cups her hands toward the sky and repeats the same plea:Fill it up.She just never imagined fortune might actually answer.

Karmella DiGrazia has spent her career protecting children inside a system known to have cracks.A Chicago social worker with scars of her own, she understands better than most what happens when the people meant to keep a child safe are the ones causing the harm.Her wife, Hope, understands it too. The two met in college and eventually found their way into the same line of work- but from very different sides of it. Hope works in the field, walking into homes and seeing families at their most complicated. Karmella works behind a computer, where every hotline call, investigation, placement and failure becomes another entry in a child's history.But when therapy begins stirring up pieces of her own past, Karmella discovers something she can’t explain: she has the ability to make people experience the pain they’ve inflicted on others.At first, it feels impossible.
Then it feels like justice.And when the system fails the children she’s sworn to protect, Karmella begins to wonder why she should leave justice to the system at all.Her name is Karmella.But some know her as Karma.