Howard Owen
1) Oregon Hill
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Willie Black is a reporter in Richmond, Va. Pugnacious and defiant, Black was once a star covering politics, and then he was captured by the bottle, messed up one too many times and found himself demoted to the nighttime police beat. He has three ex-wives, a daughter who tolerates him and bean-counter bosses cutting costs by laying off reporters. Then Willie happens to catch a late-night report about a body in a river, which is determined to be
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Willie Black was last seen, in Oregon Hill, risking the final tattered remnants of his checkered career - and his life - to free a man almost everyone else believed guilty. Willie's still covering the night police beat with its violent drug deals and dirt naps, still avoiding the hawk that periodically swoops down to pluck away a few more of his colleagues in a floundering business. He still drinks too much, smokes too much, and disobeys too much....
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Before he let his life fall apart, James "Neil" Beauchamp was special. He lived and flourished in the world of privilege, adored and accommodated. Then, before he truly learned to appreciate it, the one talent that lifted him from a small life in a small town was gone. The only thing worse than spending your life earthbound, Neil would learn, is landing hard and knowing you'll never fly again. Born in Penns Castle, in the castle itself, he was...
5) Harry & Ruth
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Don't torture yourself, Ruth Crowder Flood has always told Harry Stein. Don't let your life be ruined by what might have been. But he can't help it. And, in truth, neither can she. In the one short moment that was theirs, Ruth had too much pride and Harry didn't have enough courage. In the instant that defined the rest of their lives, they both hesitated and were lost, condemned to wander in a wilderness of their own making. In Harry & Ruth, Howard...
6) Rock of Ages
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In Rock of Ages, Howard Owen returns to the terrain of Scots County, North Carolina, site of his best-selling novel Littlejohn. Littlejohn McCain has been dead 11 years. In that time, his daughter has divorced one husband and buried another. Georgia has reclaimed her original name and believes she is starting to settle comfortably into the last and quietest third of her life. But then she starts seeing her dead father-not just in dreams, but...
7) Turn Signal
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No one thought Jack Stone of Speakeasy, Virginia, was the kind of man who would try to solve his problems with a .38. But here he is, on a train to New York, armed and dangerously determined that somebody is going to read his damn novel. Jack once had dreams of bigger things, but here he is, a long-distance trucker with a shaky home life and one last chance to be special. All that the New York editor needs is a little persuasion.
8) Parker Field
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Les Hacker doesn't seem to have an enemy in the world other than whoever tried to kill him with a high-powered rifle while he was sitting on a park bench six floors below Willie Black's living room window. Les is the closest thing Willie has had to a father figure in a checkered life of drinking, divorces, and journalism. Now, with Les clinging to life, Willie decides to take a short sabbatical and do a story about his surrogate dad and the last minor-league...
9) Evergreen
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Willie Black knew he had a father, even if he didn't know where he was buried.
It wasn't like Artie Lee gave his son anything but his genes. He died when Willie was fifteen months old, and Artie and Peggy never married. They couldn't have, in the segregated commonwealth of Virginia in 1960.
Then, in January of 2018, Artie Lee, dead almost fifty-seven years, reinserts himself into his son's life. Philomena Slade calls Willie, the mixed-race night...
10) Scuffletown
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A familiar name piques Willie Black's interest on a slow news day: Scuffletown Park. He and the first of his four wives lived next to the pocket park when they were young and still on speaking terms. Now, Scuffletown is the site of a crime scene, one that doesn't fit the usual modus operandi for Richmond. For one thing, there's plenty of blood but no body. Also, it seems that a knife was involved-a rarity in Willie's gun-happy city. And Scuffletown...
11) Belle Isle
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When two teenage lovers find a human leg while cavorting in the thickets of Belle Isle, can Willie Black be far behind? Belle Isle, in the middle of the James River, was one of Willie's party spots growing up wild in Oregon Hill, and it's a short walk from where he now resides in the posh Prestwould. Now, as the fifty-something night cops reporter for the local daily, he returns to his old haunts to try to unravel a mystery. When it becomes known...
12) The Bottom
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Richmond is in a panic. For the fourth time in eighteen months, a young girl or woman has been brutalized and murdered. This time the body of a fourteen-year-old girl is found in Richmond's Shockoe Bottom train station. On her ankle is the same perversely cartoonish tattoo that has led the cops and newspapers to dub the perpetrator the Tweety Bird killer. When Willie Black finds out that the night security guy at the station was lured away from his...
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When a twin-engine Beechcraft crashes into one of Richmond's watering holes and turns happy hour into Hell, theories run rampant. Was it terrorists who, for some reason, decided to vent their spleens on unsuspecting Richmond? Was it a statement by homegrown killers less-than-thrilled that the city still, in the 21st century, chooses to honor Confederate leaders on its most prominent avenue?
The obvious answers, though, just don't pan out. All the...
14) Grace
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Life is cheap on the poor side of town. For more than two decades, young black kids have been disappearing from Richmond's East End. No bodies have ever been found, and the missing boys haven't received much attention from police or the media. When the uncle of the latest missing kid takes matters into his own hands and holds the daily newspaper's publisher hostage in the paper's lobby, Willie Black gets involved, and things start to change.
The...