[Read by Kevin Kenerly] 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.

Oregon Hill

Literature & Fiction

Howard Owen

United States

Blackstone Audiobooks

[Library Edition Audiobook CD in sturdy Vinyl case.]  [Read by Kevin Kenerly](Sequel to Oregon Hill) 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. 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.

The Philadelphia Quarry: The Willie Black Mysteries, Book 2

[Read by Kevin Kenerly] 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. - - 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.

Parker Field (Willie Black Mysteries, Book 3)

Blackstone Audio

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.

The Bottom (Willie Black Mysteries, Book 4)

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Blackstone Audio,Inc.

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 also in her Montclair University classroom. Her son Justin is already down in North Carolina with his pregnant girlfriend, helping prepare what's left of Littlejohn's farm for sale. On the verge of a breakdown, Georgia joins them. As a girl, Georgia couldn't wait to get away from the farm and her moribund hometown. She's back now, but only long enough to sell the former and bid a final, less-than-fond farewell to the latter. Or so she thinks. When her cousin Jenny dies neglected and under mysterious circumstances, Georgia is forced to deal with a major dose of baby-boomer guilt. She's always told herself that she could live with the knowledge that she would never truly "do right" by her older relatives, but now she's not so sure. The "peace that passes understanding" about which the members of her father's old church sing seems far beyond her reach. Georgia, with grandmotherhood and a ghost hovering, tries to discover what really happened to Jenny and partially redeem herself. In the process, she will find two things she never expected in the middle of the dead-calm boredom of East Geddie - requited, taboo-flouting lust and a murder mystery.

Rock of Ages

Permanent Press

George James and Freeman Hawk were unlikely friends. George was part of soft-spoken, old-money Richmond; Freeman came from a hardscrabble country family mired in poverty and marked by violence. Fate threw them together long ago as freshman roommates at New Hope College. It was the late 60s, and George was the standard-bearer for a society living on borrowed time while Freeman was leading the charge into what came next. Before they left New Hope, though, Freeman would convert George, convince him that there was a better world to be made, persuade him temporarily to forsake the seamless life that already was mapped out for him as the Ham Prince of Richmond. Canada. The option to war-bloodied America, beckoned. The moment of truth came in a small town on the Vermont border, where George James lost his faith in Freeman Hawk or perhaps in himself and hesitated. Fast-forward to the early twenty-first century, in a world whose axis has been tilted by 9/11. George and his son Jake, are existing in a shaky approximation of normalcy, nursing the wounds of their own, personal loss as George negotiates the sale of the family business and Jake, plunged into despair and rage by his mother s death, is consigned to a private school for troubled teens. Things get dicier when Freeman Hawk reappears. Nothing about him is as it seems, not even his name. Freeman is on the run, but from what? In Howard Owen s ninth novel, old scabs are torn off and new wounds inflicted. In the end there will be a reckoning for all of them, and sixteen-year old Jake James will find himself at a border as daunting as the one from which his father turned back so long ago.

The Reckoning

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. 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.

The Philadelphia Quarry

Literary

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 (Willie Black) (Willie Black Mystery)

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.

Annie's Bones

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 50-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.

The Devil's Triangle (Willie Black, 6)

Permanent Pr Pub Co

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Books by Howard Owen