Every month, seven very different people climb a narrow staircase in a River North restaurant, take their seats around a long oval table, and do what they do best: argue, interrogate, and think.

There’s Nora, the retired biotech CEO who built the group and quietly runs it. Diane, the criminal defense attorney who treats every theory like a witness she’s about to shred. Sanjay, the cybersecurity consultant who sees every puzzle as a system waiting to be broken. Ruth, the investigative journalist who listens in silence and then asks the one question nobody else thought of. Dr. Park, the forensic pathologist who brings uncomfortable precision to comfortable theories. And Jimmy, the urban historian who can trace every present-day mystery back through a century of Chicago.

And then there’s Marcus — the restaurant’s sommelier, co-owner, and former philosophy PhD candidate — who pours the wine, attends every course, and at the end of the evening offers the insight that makes everything suddenly, infuriatingly obvious.

The Society Dinners: Volume 1 collects all twelve months of their first year together. Each story is a standalone mystery — a theft, a disappearance, a forgery, an identity unraveling, an impossible situation with a perfectly possible explanation — and each is built around a dinner, served course by course, so that the puzzle deepens alongside the meal.

No murders. No violence. Just twelve beautifully constructed puzzles, a city with more secrets than it lets on, and a group of brilliant, difficult, genuinely funny people who can’t help but solve things.