In the fall of 1967, Grayson Melvin met the girl of his dreams. Annie Lineberger was so far out his league that he felt like she was playing an entirely different game, but somehow he won her affections. He couldn't believe his good luck while it lasted. They both were 18, but Grayson was a baby, and Annie had been around. She was beautiful, smart and funny. When she told him she loved him, he would have died for her, right then and there. Instead, Annie died or at least disappeared from the face of the earth. On the same night when she broke Grayson's teenage heart by giving him his walking papers, she vanished. Everyone believed he killed her. Without a body, though, nothing could be proved. And so Grayson Melvin lived his life. Kicked out of his university, he went from the Army and Vietnam to bartending to another college to newspapers, where he discovered that Annie s well-connected and vengeful family still had the power to step into his stunted life and punish him. Then, in the spring of 2016, Annie reappears. Our at least her bones do, dug up by a backhoe operator clearing land for a strip mall in a small Virginia town. Grayson, now teaching at a community college in Richmond and creeping toward retirement, is back in a spotlight he has tried to avoid for all his adult life. With the court of public opinion almost unanimously against him, Grayson goes back to North Carolina to try to make the past go away, with disastrous results. Then, he gets a call. A woman he doesn't know in a town where he's never been has found a ring his high school ring last seen in Annie Lineberger's possession. Grayson Melvin has one chance to prove his innocence, by chasing a ghost and figuring out what happened on that long-ago night, the one when he lost Annie.
Author
Howard Owen was born March 1, 1949, in Fayetteville, N.C. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1971, journalism) and has a master's degree from Virginia Commonwealth University (1981, English). He and his wife since 1973, Karen Van Neste Owen (the former publisher of Van Neste Books), live in Richmond, Va. He was a newspaper reporter and editor for 44 years. Owen won The Dashiell Hammett Prize for crime literature in the United States and Canada for Oregon Hill, his 10th novel. His first novel, "Littlejohn," was written in 1989, when he was 40. It was bought by The Permanent Press and published in 1992. Random House bought it from The Permanent Press and reissued it as a Villard hardcover in 1993 and a Vintage Contemporary paperback in 1994. It was nominated for the Abbey Award (American Booksellers) and Discovery (Barnes & Noble) award for best new fiction. It has sold, in all, more than 50,000 copies. It has been printed in Japanese, French and Korean; it has been a Doubleday Book Club selection; audio and large-print editions have been issued, and movie option rights have been sold. His second novel, "Fat Lightning," came out as a Permanent Press book in 1994. It was bought by HarperCollins and was reissued as a Harper Perennial paperback in 1996. It received a starred review from Publishers' Weekly. His third novel, "Answers to Lucky," was published by HarperCollins as a hardcover in 1996 and as a paperback in 1997. It received favorable reviews in The New York Times, Southern Living, GW, Publishers' Weekly, the Atlanta Constitution, the Baltimore Sun, the Memphis Commercial Appeal and numerous other publications. It was included in "The Best Novels of the Nineties: A Reader’s Guide." His fourth novel, "The Measured Man," was published in hardcover by HarperCollins in 1997. It was praised in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Publishers' Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, the Raleigh News & Observer, the Orlando Sentinel, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel and many other publications. It was one of the LA Times Book Reviews’ "Recommended Titles" for 1997. It was included in "The Best Novels of the Nineties: A Reader’s Guide." Owen's fifth novel, "Harry and Ruth," was published by The Permanent Press in September of 2000 to critical acclaim from Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly and various weekly publications. His sixth novel, "The Rail," was published in April of 2002. It is about (among other things) baseball and the parable of the talents. Owen won the 2002 Theresa Pollack Award for Words. His seventh novel, "Turn Signal," was about a man whose muse drives him either to madness or to the best move he's ever made in his life. It came out in 2004 and was a Booksense selection for July of 2004. His eighth novel, "Rock of Ages," is something of a sequel to his first novel, "Littlejohn." Georgia McCain returns to her hometown years after her father’s death to sell the family farm and finds herself immersed in baby-boomer guilt and a murder mystery. It was a Booksense pick for July of 2006. His ninth novel, "The Reckoning," about ghosts of the ’60s, came out in late 2010 and received very positive reviews from, among others, Publishers Weekly and the New York Journal of Books. His short story, "The Thirteenth Floor," part of "Richmond Noir," came out in early 2010. The protagonist of “The Thirteenth Floor,” Willie Black, also is at the center of Owen’s 10th novel, “Oregon Hill,” which came in July of 2012 to very positive reviews in The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and elsewhere. It's also an audio book. Willie starred in future Owen novels: The Philadelphia Quarry (2013), Parker Field (2014), The Bottom (2015), Grace (2016) and The Devil's Triangle (2017). His 16th novel, Annie's Bones, comes out in April of 2018.
