Nobody Will Laugh

In the fall of 1994, a teacher at Chicago's run-down Steinmetz High conspires with the school's academic decathlon team to cheat on an academic competition.

The true story of 20-year-old Colleen Stan, a hitchhiking woman abducted by a young couple and held captive for seven years, during which time she's tortured and forced to live as a slave to her captors.

Thomas Montgomery, a married father of two young daughters, gets seduced by the world of online gambling and chat rooms where a virtual romance and sexual obsession ultimately leads to the murder of an innocent man.

The Sheffield family reveal and go through some home truths as their middle child inherits the Foxworth mansion. The family's ghosts looming over, and more tragedies are in store as the curse lives on.

Two separate stories mesh - in the first, a young music teacher, Maggie Andrews, begins dying of a heart condition and her son Nathan tries to get a pair of Christmas shoes for her before she dies. In the second, lawyer Robert Layton and his wife Kate are slowly drifting apart and the matter comes to a head during Christmas when Kate takes over for Maggie for the school choir.

While settling his father’s estate, Finn Conrad becomes suspicious as to why the man left a nurse $100,000. His dad knew her for less than two months before he died. Just before Christmas, Finn wants what to reclaim what he considers his family’s money, going undercover to investigate the bed and breakfast the nurse has recently taken over. When Finn meets Willa, he discovers she’s not a conniving gold digger at all, but a woman in need who put the money to good use. When she discovers his true identity, will it keep Willa from ever trusting him again?