Willie Black

Series · 6 books · 2012-2017

By Howard Owen

Books in series

Oregon Hill

2012

Willie Black is a newspaper reporter who has squandered a lot of things in this 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 first came to work at 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 leisure pastime, was 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 co-ed at the local university where Willie's daughter is a perpetual student is murdered, her headless body found alongside the South Anna River, the hapless killer is arrested within days. Everyone but Willie seems to think: case 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. He 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 who everyone thought had disappeared a long time ago. As a result, a score born in the parking lot of an Oregon Hill beer joint forty years before will finally be settled. The truth is out there. Willie Black's going to dig it out or die trying.

The Philadelphia Quarry

2013

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 was guilty. Willie's still covering the night police beat with its DDGBs 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 and disobeys too much. The only thing that keeps him employed: 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 at the city's most exclusive swimming hole. The Quarry was where Alicia Parker Simpson identified Richard Slade as her rapist, 28 yeas ago. Then, five days after DNA evidence freed Slade from the prison system in which he had spent his adult life, Alicia Simpson is shot to death. Hardly anyone doubts that Richard Slade did it. Who could blame him? But Willie has his doubts. When the full weight of the city's old money falls on him, trying to crush the story, he only becomes more determined to chase the thing that always seems to get him in trouble - the truth. The fact that Richard Slade is his cousin, a link to his long-dead African-American father, only makes Willie more tenacious. In the end, Willie will be drawn back to the Philadelphia Quarry, where it all started so long ago and in whose murky waters the truth lies.

Parker Field

2014

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 mn 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 in his coat pocket, case closed. Willie's publishr and the police want him to stop wasting his time and theirs and get back on the beat. Willie becomes convicned, 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 (2012 and The Philadelphia Quarry (2013) 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.

The Bottom

2015

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 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 - 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. Eventually, Sax is released and the city goes on high alert 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 to follow Oregon Hill (winner of the 2012 Hammett Prize), 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.

Grace

2016

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. Grace is the name of a street that bisects Richmond like a belt from east to west, passing through all the city’s economic strata and brushing against its sometimes dark history. Grace is also the state that Willie, a man of large appetites and myriad vices, continues to seek with middling results. Grace is Howard Owen’s fifth Willie Black mystery. The first, Oregon Hill, won the Dashiell Hammett Prize for best crime literature in the United States and Canada. The Willie Black series has received glowing reviews in The New York Times, Publishers’ Weekly, Kirkus Reviews and elsewhere.

The Devil's Triangle

2017

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.

Author

Howard Owen

Author · 18 books

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.