Library's review
I wasn't sure what to expect from this novel, featuring a nearly washed-up journalist in Richmond, Virginia, who has to battle his past as well as his bosses to find the truth behind a series of murders in his Oregon Hill neighborhood. Willie Black was an extremely appealing narrator and protagonist. I was rooting for him all the way through, and found his ambivalence about facing his less-than-privileged past quite realistic.
The newspaper bits also had a ring of truth about them, only a little bit idealized — but then as my colleagues and I always proclaimed, you could never write a true novel about newspapers because nobody outside of the business would ever believe it. This novel was believable as well as enjoyable. I'd like to read more about Willie and his cohorts.
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Fiction. Mystery. HTML: 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 the decapitated corpse of a student at Virginia Commonwealth University, Isabel Ducharme. Diabolically, Isabel's head has been shipped to her home in Boston. A suspect is quickly corralled, a sometime-student, sometime-deadbeat named Martin Fell who has a fondness for college girls. There's a rapid confession. Willie thinks the story's over, but then he gets a call from his latest ex-wife, now a lawyer, who wants him to meet with Fell's mother and hear an alibi the police refuse to consider. Nearly all that happens is centered around Oregon Hill, a Richmond neighborhood, "a tight little inbred box" full of factory workers and laborers, fighters and drinkers. Owen's characters are superbly realistic: Willie himself, sired by a light-skinned African-American musician; his white mother, rejected by family, who turned to serial boyfriends and marijuana; David Junior Shiflett, a police lieutenant whose father was killed in a barroom brawl; Valentine Chadwick IV, the elder Shiflett's murderer; and Awesome Dude, once a student, now a brain-addled possible witness to Isabelle's murder. Owen knows his setting, his dialogue is spot-on, and his grasp of the down-and-dirty work of the police and news reporters lends authenticity to the narrative. This is Southern literature as expected, with a touch of noir and with a touch of Dennis Lehane's Mystic River. .… (more)