Howard Owen – författare

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 world’s oldest night cops reporter knows something about the inequities of race and income. When Sam McNish, a crusader for social justice who grew up in the same hardscrabble Oregon Hill neighborhood as Willie, is arrested shortly after a child’s body is discovered, the police start making the case that McNish has been the demonic force behind all the boys’ disappearances.

Willie, after working the traps he’s developed from his too-many years as a reporter, isn’t so sure.

As Willie teases out the real story, he manages to antagonize his publisher and the city’s power structure as well as police chief L.D. Jones, but experience has taught him that the more people he angers, the closer he probably is to the truth. Along the way, he forms a strange alliance with Big Boy Sunday, a dangerous man who exhibits a strong interest in seeing that Willie finds the truth—although Willie will learn that Big Boy wants parts of that truth to remain hidden.

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 is in the heart of the Fan, where violence is a blessedly rare occurrence.

Before long there is a body. There also is a neighbor who caught the deed on his iPhone camera. When his old friend and current police flack Peachy Love gives Willie a sneak-peek at the remarkably clear photograph, he starts wishing he’d never seen Scuffletown Park again.

How is it possible that Abe Custalow is standing over what appears to be a very dead body? Abe has been sharing Willie Black’s condo since Willie found his childhood pal living homeless in Monroe Park. Even now, with Willie married to the lovely Cindy Peroni Black, Abe remains ensconced there. Okay, he did kill a guy once, but the guy deserved killing, and Abe’s been “Mr. Clean” ever since.

With his condo-mate in jail, Willie does what a good reporter does best: he starts digging—with no assistance from Abe, who insists that Willie “just leave it alone.” That would go against every instinct in Willie Black’s nosy-ass body, but when he finally gets within hailing distance of the truth, he understands why Abe wanted him to back off.

Before Scuffletown reaches its conclusion, Willie knows he will have to risk his oldest friendship in order to save his oldest friend from a life behind bars.

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 shoot-from-the-hip purveyors of vigilante justice have to stand down when it becomes clear that the pilot of the suicide plane was a disaffected former Richmonder, David Biggio, with no known links to any terrorist organizations, foreign or domestic. For Willie Black, the daily newspaper’s hard-charging, hard-drinking night cops reporter, the question still remains: Why?

To complicate matters, one of the victims of the kamikaze crash was the present husband of Willie’s third ex-wife, Kate. Willie’s reconnection with her is placing his present relationship with the lovely Cindy Peroni on shaky ground. And, as the newspaper business continues on a death spiral that seems to rival Biggio’s last flight, the city’s most intrepid reporter wonders just how long a fifty-something guy with authority issues can hope to draw a weekly paycheck. New ownership of the paper looms, and Willie comes to realize that sometimes things are darkest just before they get pitch black.

Willie’s search for the truth eventually leads him to a small town on the Chesapeake where David Biggio spent his last years. There, Willie will eventually learn what drove a deranged man to commit an act of seemingly anonymous mayhem. And, as has often been the case in the past, he will find that the answers he seeks can come at a high price.

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 that the dismembered member belonged to Teddy “T-Bone” Delmonico, a state college football legend, whose now-widow is running for a seat in the House of Representatives, the plot thickens. The deceased had plenty of enemies: the investors who lost their nest eggs in a scheme fronted by T-Bone and an associate, a former wife with an axe to grind, and, among others, the grieving widow. Who did it, and why, will consume Richmond’s most dogged journalist, who drinks too much, smokes too much, and hopes the fourth time is a charm, marriage-wise. Willie Black, whose first-person voice has been called by the New York Times “a crisp and colorful urban idiom we can’t wait to hear again,” is on the prowl, looking for answers.

Willie Black is a newspaper reporter who has squandered a lot of things in his life—his liver, his lungs, a couple of former wives, and a floundering daughter can all attest to his abuse. He''s lucky to be employed, having managed to drink and smart-talk his way out of a nice, cushy job covering—and partying with—the politicians down at the capitol.

Now he''s back on the night cops beat, right where he started when he came to work for the Richmond paper almost thirty years ago. The thing Willie''s always had going for him, though—all the way back to his hardscrabble days as a mixed-race kid on Oregon Hill, where white was the primary color and fighting was everyone''s favorite pastime—is grit. His mother, the drug-addled Peggy, gave him that if nothing else. He never backed down then, and he shows no signs of changing.

When a coed at the local university where Willie''s daughter is a perpetual student is murdered, her headless body found along the South Anna River, the hapless alleged killer is arrested within days. Everyone seems to think the case is closed. But Willie, against the orders and advice of his bosses at the paper, the police, and just about everyone else, doesn''t think the case is solved at all and embarks on a one-man crusade to do what he''s always done: get the story.

On the way, Willie runs afoul of David Junior Shiflett, a nightmare from his youth who''s now a city cop, and awakens another dark force, one everyone thought disappeared long ago. And a score born in the parking lot of an Oregon Hill beer joint forty years ago will finally be settled.

The truth is out there, and Willie Black''s going to dig it up—or die trying.

Black is back. 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. The only thing that keeps him employed is that he''s a damn fine reporter. Even his beleaguered bosses would concede that.

Willie finds himself neck-deep in a part of Richmond that a boy growing up in Oregon Hill could only experience through illicit midnight sorties to the city''s most exclusive swimming hole. The Quarry was where Alicia Parker Simpson identified Richard Slade as her rapist twenty-eight years ago. Five days after DNA evidence recently freed Slade from the prison system in which he had spent his adult life, Alicia Simpson was found shot to death.

Almost everyone thinks Slade did it—who can blame them?—but Willie has his doubts. And when the full weight of the city''s old money falls on him, trying to crush the story, he becomes even more determined to chase the thing that always seems to get him into trouble: the truth. That Richard Slade is his cousin and a link to his long-dead African American father only makes Willie that much more tenacious.

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. He certainly has better qualifications than any of the other men Willie''s mother, Peggy, took in over the years. Of course, as Willie would say, that would only make him a tall midget.

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 baseball team Les played on: the 1964 Richmond Virginians.

There''s only one problem. As Willie tries to get in touch with other members of that team, he discovers that they are almost all below ground—most of them long before their allotted three-score and ten years. The cops already have Les'' shooter in jail, a homeless guy who hangs out in the park. The shot was fired from his coat pocket, case closed. Willie''s publisher and the police want him to stop wasting his time—and theirs—and get back on the beat. Willie becomes convinced, though, that someone, against all logic, is killing the entire starting lineup of a long-forgotten minor-league baseball team. And when Willie gets his teeth on the truth, he''s a pit bull who won''t let anything short of a shot to the head force him to let go.

In this third Willie Black novel, after Hammett Prize finalist Oregon Hill and The Philadelphia Quarry, Howard Owen brings back his flawed, ink-stained hero, a reporter who seems to do his best work when he''s chasing a story nobody else wants, who can be his own worst enemy and the underdog''s best friend.

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 post by a phone call from Willie’s daughter just before the body was dumped, the story gets weirder—and a lot more personal.

At the same time, Willie’s paper is facing a lawsuit from a developer who wants to make a killing of another kind by turning part of the Bottom into Top of the Bottom—a mix of big-box stores and apartments. It’s an area where slaves were buried in unmarked graves, many of them still not discovered. The Bottom is emblematic of what Willie thinks of as the permanent stain Richmond can never wash away, but now he and the paper are under pressure to “lay off” Wat Chenault and his plans to turn the land into a real estate bonanza.

When the police arrest Ronnie Sax, a photographer who used to work at Willie’s paper, for the murders, the evidence seems overwhelming. But then Willie starts getting letters from someone who seems to know more about the killings than an innocent bystander should. Sax is eventually released, and the city goes on high alert once again. At the same time, Willie grows more and more suspicious about Chenault’s motives.

Willie is also trying to crawl back into the good graces of the lovely Cindy Peroni, seeking to convince her that he at last has a handle on his bourbon and two-packs-a-day habits.

In The Bottom, the fourth Willie Black mystery, Richmond’s nosiest newspaperman, true to form, chases the story like a bulldog going after a pork chop. But once he’s caught it, he’ll wish he hadn’t.