Oregon Hill

By Howard Owen

Willie Black 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 corps beat, right where he started when he came to work for the Richmond paper almost 30 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 along the South Anna River, the hapless alleged 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, one everyone thought disappeared a long time ago. And a score born in the parking lot of an Oregon Hill beer joint 40 years ago will finally be settled.

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Permanent Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781579622084

Howard Owen

Howard Owen grew up near Fayetteville, North Carolina. He and his wife, Karen, live in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and are editors for The Free Lance-Star. This is his tenth novel. his earlier works include: Littlejohn, Fat Lightning, Rock of Ages, and The Reckoning. The protagonist of Oregon Hill, Willie Black, first appeared in a short story, The Thirteenth Floor, which was part of Richmond Noir. Willie appeared again in three consecutive sequels: The Philadelphia Quarry (2013), Parker Field (2014), and The Bottom (2015).

Book preview

stories.

CHAPTER ONE

Tuesday, October 6

The South Anna isn’t much of a river to begin with, and it had been a dry fall.

Her body had gotten hung up on a downed tree branch a couple of feet into the water.

I was there about half an hour after some deputy sheriff reported it, and nobody was that much into protecting the scene or any such shit. Not yet.

I actually beat the Richmond city cops there by a minute or two. The place wasn’t easy to find. A couple out canoeing, slipping away on that perfect fall afternoon, had come across it, beached the canoe next to the first cleared field they saw and got a somewhat frazzled housewife to call the sheriff.

I heard about it as soon as I got in. I’d wasted precious hours the night before covering a drug-deal-gone-bad fatality in the East End, then posting it on our Web site. The DDGB was too late for the metro city edition, what with our earlier deadlines, but we wanted our former faithful subscribers to be able to read it for free.

Sally Velez came up to me, walking fast, before I’d even gone for coffee.

I think they found her, she said, humming slightly with the kind of energy we achieve only when really horrific events interrupt our tedium. We’re ashamed of ourselves, but, God help us, we do love it so.

The GPS was worthless, as it often is, but by following a thin red line off a thin red line off U.S. 33 on my dog-eared state gazetteer, I finally got there about four o’clock, not dressed for a swamp but with no choice. The deputy was standing at the edge of the clearing, and another squad car was charging up, all blue lights and siren, ploughing up the farmer’s field.

The first deputy looked a little queasy. He led the others down to the South Anna, and they didn’t object when I followed. The mud was thick and gummy, almost sucking my shoes off my feet.

She’d gone missing four days before, and her body looked as if it had spent every bit of four days being ravaged by nature. Most of her clothes were still intact, but there was bloating, and what must have been damage by animals.

At first, I didn’t even notice, because of the way she was. Her body was pointed down, into the water, and her shoulders were bent over the tree branch that had caught her. Nobody was supposed to touch her until the medical examiner arrived, but one of the kid deputies in the second cop car waded in, unable to restrain himself, I guess.

Only when he moved her body a little, causing the torso to bob more upright, did I, and the kid, see it.

Oh, shit, he said, then turned around and threw up, mostly not on his shoes. The first deputy was standing next to me, just looking across the river. He never said anything the whole time I was there.

I see the dead and soon-to-be dead all the time, have witnessed often the damage that bullets do to soft tissue. This was different. This was like the two-year-old East End kid last year who was running toward her older sister inside their row house, when a bullet meant to scare some teenage drug dealer standing on the street outside tore through the flimsy walls and ruptured her heart.

This was the slaughter of an innocent.

Why? the kid deputy asked as he tried to wash vomit off his shoes. And he didn’t have to finish the sentence.

Everyone understood the question: Why would anyone abduct a young girl, kill her and pitch her body into the South Anna River, to be ravaged by the birds and rats?

And why, in the name of Christ, would he cut her head off?

When the Richmond city cops finally got there, I was chagrined to see in the fading light that Gillespie was one of the four who’d finally found the crime scene. He’d had it in for me since I tried to get his fat ass fired for causing a completely avoidable suicide in my presence the year before. They didn’t fire him, just suspended him—with pay, at that—for three months. And now, whenever our paths crossed, there was shit to take.

Black, he said, his lip curling into a sneer. I better not hear that you’ve been tampering with evidence. Now get the fuck out of here. This is a crime scene.

I congratulated him on finally finding it and asked if he had any more comments for me to pass on to our readers.

He blanched and then said, You wouldn’t dare.

One of the other cops looked familiar. When he passed in front of the squad car’s lights, I was sure. I called out.

David Junior.

David Shiflett looked at me for a couple of seconds. When he saw who it was, I had the feeling he wasn’t that pleased to see me.

Willie, he said, not even trying to smile. Willie Black. Hey, Hill reunion, huh?

He’d been a menacing presence as an older boy in Oregon Hill long ago, and the menace was still there, either sent out by him or imagined by me. He’s still on the Hill. I see him from a distance sometimes when I’m visiting Peggy, but I haven’t spoken to him in years.

I told him not to let Gillespie eat all the doughnuts, and Gillespie threatened to have me arrested if I didn’t—right damn now—get behind the crime scene tape they still were putting up.

Back at the paper, I told them that, no, I didn’t take the damn idiot camera, that our readers would have to be content with words this time.

Jackson was not pleased, not because he cared much for photojournalism either, but because he knew the new managing editor did.

I told Jackson what we were dealing with, but I didn’t really want to talk about what I’d seen. Somebody might try to turn it into some kind of dark humor, and I might have to hit them. I went to get some coffee, only to discover that, as was usually the case, some considerate individual had emptied the pot and hadn’t started a fresh one.

I was waiting for the new one to brew when one of our Sarahs came in. This one actually is named Sarah. Sarah Good-night. U.Va., Class of ’08. We generally have two kinds of people in our newsroom. We have the old farts like me, mostly male, trying to hang on to our sorry-ass jobs in a dying industry in a tanking economy. And you have the Sarahs. They’re mostly women. They’re young, they’re talented, they’re motivated, and they’re very politely, very respectfully waiting for us to get the fuck out of the way so they can get our jobs, which they’ll do just as well for about half the salary. If we don’t get out of the way, they go to law school, which many of them do anyhow.

Still, no hard feelings. Hell, I was young once. Really. Besides, one of them might be my boss some day.

She adjusted one of her spaghetti straps and asked me about the body. I poured her a cup, then one for myself, and told her the basic, gory details.

Oh, my god, she said. Her head? He cut her head off?

He. She. Somebody.

She’d gone to a couple of homicides with me, just for the experience, and she didn’t flinch or go all girly about seeing her first dirt nap, but I could tell this shook her a little.

We went back into the newsroom. Sarah led the way and I tried to keep my eyes straight ahead, torn between the urge to advise her to dress more professionally and the desire to hit on her. As is (I am proud to say) almost always the case, I took the safe middle ground.

It didn’t take long for a story like that to pass through the newsroom. I tried to tell as little as possible.

After half an hour, I had to get up and go down to the ground floor and out into the courtyard, where smoking is permitted. During the day, it’s kind of sad to be there with all the others pretending to be mavericks instead of addicts. At night, when the ad salesmen and bean counters have gone home, it’s kind of peaceful.

I tried Andi’s cell number, but I didn’t leave a message. I’d left one the last time I called. Didn’t want to seem desperate.

Sally Velez was waiting when I came back in. She pulled me into one of our phone-booth conference rooms, looking quite serious. Sally’s forty or forty-one, and her dark hair has streaks of gray that I admire her for not tinting. Like so many older women at the paper, she did at one time deign to spend non-work hours with me. It was between my second and third wives.

People will talk, I said. She didn’t even tell me to shut the fuck up, her usual response to my lighthearted banter.

They found it, she said. Up in Massachusetts.

Isabel Ducharme had come to Richmond in August to start classes at Virginia Commonwealth University. It’s what they call an urban school, and it doesn’t get a large number of out-of-state students, but for some reason, Isabel had chosen to come here from a suburb of Boston.

She had disappeared the Friday before, last seen leaving a bar on West Main that she’d apparently been able to penetrate with a fake ID. She was, her suitemates agreed, on the strength of some five weeks’ acquaintance, a sweet-natured, friendly girl, prone to get a little wild when she had too much to drink. She wanted to be a veterinarian, she’d told them.

In the photos, she had dark hair, a nice natural tan and bright, expressive eyes.

If she had been some black girl from the projects, Handley Pace said, would we be burning this much newsprint?

No, I told him, probably not.

Still . . . I said.

Yeah.

Isabel Ducharme’s father had stayed behind when his wife came south on Sunday, as soon as she was notified that their daughter was missing. She explained that her husband was too upset to make the trip.

He apparently had stayed home from work, waiting for news. UPS delivered the package about one thirty.

It was about a foot square, and Philippe Ducharme was surprised by its weight. He was sitting at the kitchen table when he opened it, and when he saw what was inside, he merely wrapped his late daughter’s head back up and called the police. They found him outside, perched on the curb, his hand on top of the box at his side, staring into space.

By the time the police had called his wife, she had just been notified by the Richmond cops’ grief squad that they had found the body.

Marie Ducharme made a brief appearance on one of the local TV stations that night. She’d been on twice before, pleading with her daughter’s presumed abductors to please, please let her go. She had been somewhat charming, I thought, dressed stylishly but not too much so, talking with a hint of a French accent. She was, to be crude, a MILF. Thing is, she displayed so much class that people used to seeing drama-addicted next-of-kin go batshit in high-def suspected her of being cold.

Now, she was about as cold as a blast furnace in hell.

They had to bleep about every third word, but the gist was that she rued the day she’d ever let her beautiful Isabel come to this godforsaken patch of perdition, which she cursed for the shithole it was and forever would be.

Who could blame her?

Murder isn’t exactly a blue-moon occurrence around here. Most of the time, it’s either DDGB or domestic. The former have abated somewhat since heroin replaced crack cocaine as the drug of choice, but we still lose about a hundred a year, on average, which means you have about a 1-in-2,000 chance of being a victim.

Now and then, though, we get an exotic, something that breaks from the same tired script.

Isabelle Ducharme’s death was definitely an exotic.

By eleven o’clock, the TV stations were in high gear. They’d been spreading her story all over the screen for three days by then, and now they had something new to boost their sadass ratings. I think the TV guys are actually more honest than we are. While we pretend that we have some kind of sacred duty to truth, justice and the American way, they’re committed to ratings, period.

Out-of-town vultures from Washington and elsewhere were pouring in. At least two crews got stuck in the Hanover County mud trying to find the scene of the crime. Others, less intrepid or more sensible, set up camp outside the hotel where Marie Ducharme was staying, and they were the ones who were able to mine a grieving mother’s insanity for a great sound bite. Other fine media outlets, from Boston and elsewhere, lay siege to the Ducharme home in Chestnut Hill.

Our new managing editor came by and stood over me while I wrote what I knew. He’d been there five months, replacing the one before him. She’d lasted two years before being lucky enough to land a job teaching journalism.

This is a dead business, she confided to me and half a dozen others at the going-away party down at Penny Lane. It struck me as funny that you’d leave a dying business to help train kids go into a dying business, but you do what you gotta do.

Mallory (Call me Mal) Wheelwright was ten years younger than I was and obviously on a much faster track. He’d come to us from Providence, and his directive was to make people read our paper. He was trying, bless his heart.

So, he said, clearing his throat, she was decapitated?

Yeah. Last time I looked.

Well, he said, that ought to sell some papers.

It doesn’t really pay to get all choked up about bad things if you’re a night cops reporter. Hell, it was the same when I covered state politics, except there you’d have to joke about some state senator getting caught with his pants down. With night cops, the humor is sometimes a little tougher to come by. Hard-bitten is something the younger ones aspire to, and sometimes I want to tell them: Don’t strain yourself; it isn’t all that great when you get there.

A guy two years out of Washington & Lee remarked, mostly for the benefit of one of the unpaid, comely fall interns, that he supposed it’d be like Stonewall Jackson’s amputated arm, buried somewhere up in Orange County while the rest of him lies in Lexington.

Gross, the intern said, smiling.

I can’t help thinking about Andi. I try to call. No answer.

The too-flinty voice advises me to leave a message. I almost hang up, but then I can’t stop myself.

Hi, sweetie, I say, and cringe, because she doesn’t like me using terms of endearment. It’s me. Dad. Call me. I nearly say please, then hang up.

The story isn’t that hard to write. It does seem to go on and on, though, with all the backstory starting Friday night. When I’m done, it’s almost thirty inches, almost a column and a half, and us trying to save newsprint.

Well, Ray Long on the copydesk says when he gets it, I guess it’s inevitable we’ll have a bad head on this one.

People groan.

I need a drink.

CHAPTER TWO

Wednesday

Peggy’s call cut my beauty rest short at about five hours.

He’s at it again, she said, by way of greeting. Were you asleep? What the hell are you doing asleep at nine o’clock?

It hardly seemed worth explaining to her that, as has been the case for a year and a half now, I cover the night cops beat, which includes the inconvenience of working evenings. Add to that the fact that we are now expected to stay around until two A.M., and pile on the fact that I can’t really sleep that well sober, and you have a very untraditional schedule. This is something that Peggy and some of my bonehead friends can’t quite seem to grasp, and I keep forgetting to unplug the phone. Abe must already be at work.

The presses run way before two A.M. As a matter of fact, the deadlines get earlier every time this woebegone industry makes another great technological leap forward, for some damn reason. But if the occasional homicidal insomniac kills his buddy over a cigarette after the bars close, I’ll be there, Willie on the spot, to report on it, for the equally insomniac fifteen readers who can’t wait for sunrise to go to our Web site. You think I’m kidding about the fifteen readers? I’ve seen the numbers, pal.

Peggy wants me to come over and get Les down again. What can I do? A boy’s best friend is his drug-addled, three times divorced, sixty-eight-year-old, bleached blonde mother. (After Kate left, Peggy said maybe three was a magic number for us. I told her I wasn’t seeing the magic.)

Besides, it’s not that far, and I can get a coffee to go at the 821 Café on the way. Maybe I’ll be awake when I get there.

On the paper rack outside the 821, I see the big block headline: GIRL’S BODY FOUND.

Third time this month, Peggy says, both of us looking up.

Maybe you should put a net around the house.

She snorts, her pigtails wiggling as she shakes her head.

It wasn’t easy getting up there. He had to put the ladder on the back side of the house, where the roof is a little more accessible. It took an effort.

Each of the first two times, I had to climb up there with him. I don’t like heights. Even more, I don’t like the idea of falling from heights. Les is a big man still, big ears, big knuckles on hands that look like the catcher’s mitts he used to wear. Usually, he’s OK, but sometimes he doesn’t quite know who he’s talking to and where he is. You hope he doesn’t momentarily mistake you for a North Korean or think you’re trying to score from second on a single to right.

Les Hacker used to play baseball. He was a Wisconsin boy who ended such career as he had with the old Vees, Triple-A farm club for the Yankees, who had plenty of catchers on the big team already. Les was no Yogi Berra.

After he retired, or was retired, he went to work for a roofer. Minor league ball never did pay much, and even less back then. Eventually, he started his own company and made a few bucks before he was forced into retirement by a broken hip brought on by a fall from a second-storey roof. A dumbass kid working summers had knocked a bucket of hot asphalt over on Les. When he told me about it, years later, he said he jumped off the roof just to get some relief.

Les met Peggy after she’d left her third husband, Mickey, the one that liked to celebrate major and minor holidays by going outside and firing a Luger into the air. Les has been exemplary compared with his predecessors, and I am inclined to try to help whenever I can. Someday, God willing, I’ll be seventy-six, too, and I’ll probably be as crazy as Les.

Peggy’s standing there in her bedroom slippers, sipping on her own coffee.

Some story. That girl.

I’m distracted at first, with the Les situation and all, then remember that Peggy always reads the paper, bless her. Ought to cut that bastard’s balls off when they catch him.

I nod and then turn my full attention back to Les. He got up there with the rickety metal ladder, same as before. Peggy says she can’t see throwing away a perfectly good ladder, and that he’d find some other way anyhow.

There’s nothing to do but follow him up.

Les is sitting there straddling the point of their roof. With his hands on his bent knees, he looks like he might be able to signal for a change-up. From here, you can see across Oregon Hill, all the way down to the river, past where the prison used to be.

Nice view, I say when I finally urge my shaky legs up to where he is. It isn’t a steep pitch, but it seems like Mount Everest to me, looking down. I know from experience that it’ll be harder for Les to get off the roof than it was to get on it. Climbing up, he thinks he’s thirty-five again, scrambling around like a monkey, waiting for his crew to follow him up. At some point, though, up here in the clear air, sanity returns.

I did it again, didn’t I?

Yeah, I tell him, as we look over toward Belle Isle and the river. You did. It’s a beautiful fall morning.

It’s like I’m sleepwalking, he says, except I’m awake.

Some people might be embarrassed by the fact that they’re losing it, but Les, when he realizes he’s done something in public that would make most of us die of shame, only laughs as if he’s just been told the funniest joke in the world. He doesn’t care that he’s the butt of it. I think it’s part of what attracted Peggy to him, the complete lack of self-consciousness. He’s a big kid in a lot of ways. He was like that even before his mind started drifting. But he’s also about the closest thing to a real man that my mother’s shared her bed with, an honest-to-God adult capable of being generous without an ulterior motive. I told her one time that her fuck-up magnet seemed to have lost its bearing when she found Les.

Same thing, Les says. I think I’m back on the job, and I’ve overslept or something, and the roof has got to be done right damn then. Geez, you’d think I’d know by now . . . His voice drifts away.

Reviews for Oregon Hill

[dasam-5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A dark, funny, caustic, well-written story about crime and the news business.

[sandra.k.heinzman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What a good thriller, and by a local author and set in Richmond, VA where I live! Such fun to read, and a fast read, too. I almost forgot it was fiction; I was that into it. I must check out other books by Mr. Owen. Should be a good discussion at book club, I hope.

[orisharir · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A good effort, but too many characters to follow. The payoff is a good one, but I'm not sure the book was worth the read.

[dablackwood · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed many things about this short novel by Howard Owen. The author does a great job at describing the job of a journalist working on a newspaper. He also presents an interesting cast of characters including the main character, Willie Mays Black. The real problem with the book is that there are too many characters and I got confused as to which one was going to appear next. The crime and its solution are interesting. I guess I would have to say that Mr. Owen tried to do too many things in this book.

[claudiemae · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Yes indeed,this was a good read. Kinda made me think of the 50's,a rough and tumble character ,has been there,done that.He is tIreless in his quest to find the murderer.The police arrest the alleged killer in a few days,and it seems everyone is satisfied and "Case Closed" Not so our Wille Black,a newspaper reporter on the night cops beat. "The thing Willie's always had going for him,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,was grit' .These words from the fly leaf of Howard Owen's book,"Oregon Hill. Those words grabbed me and I was in! Take a read ,you will enjoy.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is pure classic noir in the best possible way. Willie Black is a journalist working for a dying newspaper in Richmond, VA. He was recently demoted to cover the night crime beat and he's got three ex-wives and a daughter who will occasionally return his calls. Black covers the murder of a college student and while the cop in charge is quick to get a confession from her boyfriend, Black begins to find enough to make him question the man's guilt. Of course, digging into an already solved case endears him to no one, from his bosses at the newspaper who are always looking to trim costs, to the cop who solved the case, who knows Black from when they grew up together in the rough and tumble neighborhood of Oregon Hill.Black is my favorite kind of protagonist. He's messed up his life in many ways and has had plenty of time to thing things over. He's as aware of his own shortcomings as he is willing to understand the shortcomings of those people he has chosen to have in his life and to maybe even find some compassion for the down and outers he's come to know. He's too fond of keeping secrets to be reliable, but he's someone you'd want on your side, even if he might show up late and smelling of beer. The plot moves along quickly, with some interesting twists and the writing is workmanlike, but adept enough to make every character three dimensional and to create a feel for the streets of Richmond.

[rglossne · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The reviews below do a good job of summarizing the plot, so I won't. This is a character driven mystery set in the South, with a newspaper reporter instead of a cop or private investigator as the sleuth. The writing is good, the characters believable, the mystery although predictable, is well done. I think murder mysteries where the motives go back years are often the most satisfying, even though murder in real life is almost always an impulsive act. I enjoyed it, and I would read more stories featuring Willie Mays Black, his eccentric family, neighborhood and co-workers.

[beecharmer_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Willie Black is an aging, alcoholic newpaper reporter. He grew up in Oregon Hill where being half white and half black was reason for harrassment. A young headless girl is found in the river and Willie starts investigating. His search takes him back 40 years where a murder occurred in a bar parking lot. Willie is a very believeable character and the story was interesting and well put together. Not a fast paced page-tuner, but enough to keep you reading.

[bap1012 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Oregon Hill is a crime novel from the viewpoint of a gritty, seasoned newspaper reporter named Willie Mays Black. He's almost stereotypical in that he's an insolent, hard-drinking, smoking, thrice divorced reporter but you can like him, despite his flaws. The story revolves around the gruesome murder of a college co-ed and Willie Black's search to find the true killer when the police seem set on prosecuting a likely innocent man. The novel is in first person and many opinions, thoughts, and memories are shared throughout the book.

[annewk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A college student's headless body is found and her head delivered to her home by UPS the next day. Willie Black is a 49-year-old newspaper reporter who tells us the story, but this is not just a who-done-it. There are many quirky characters -- his mother smokes pot all day long and hooks up with unsuitable companions, presently a former roofer with dementia who keeps trying to get back up on the roof; his roommate is just released from prison; and his former wives are more or less tired of him. One of his ex-wives is an attorney who agrees to represent the man charged with killing the college student so that Willie becomes more involved in the investigation than he might have simply as a reporter.There is also a lot of angst about the current state of the newspaper business.But there is more going on here than just a mystery story; Oregon Hill is a neighborhood where people have life-long associations and memories and the author skillfully plays on all of these as Willie gets closer to the answer to all of it.It's a quick,satisfying read.

[susiebrooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Oregon Hill, a crime novel written in first person by a seasoned newspaper reporter. The author paints a picture of growing up in a small town with flashbacks of being raised by a single parent. He seems unable to maintain a personal relationship, but certainly knows how to be a friend. You see a dieing newspaper industry and the lonely lives of various town characters. Very enjoyable read and one that compels you to the end trying to discover the underlying connections and discover what really happened and why.

[rosalita_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I usually tell people that I am a recovering journalist; I worked at daily newspapers for 18 years before jumping ship and finding a new career path. Nothing that has happened in the media business in general or newspapers in particular has changed my mind about the wisdom of my mid-career change, even as I mourn the ideals with which I entered the business back in the 1980s.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.

[shearon_3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Tough and street-wise, newspaper reporter, Willie Black has seen a lot. Growing up with a usually drunk or drugged mom, no dad around and in a tough neighborhood, and now twice divorced with a strained relationship with his only daughter, and his job in jeopardy, he’s had and is having plenty of trouble. But when he thinks a man is being falsely accused of a brutal murder, even this jaded reporter feels he has to get personally involved, and even risk of his own life, to see that justice is done. Along the way, forty year old secrets are revealed and scores “settled”.Enjoyable, formulaic mystery, complete with racial tensions, dysfunctional families, dementia, quirky characters, alcohol/drug abuse, and obviously good and obviously bad guys. Nothing wrong with this book, but nothing to seek out either. Thanks to Library Thing Early Reviewers for a chance to read it.

[jmyers24_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When the headless body of college student Isabel Ducharme is found snagged on a tree branch in the South Anna River of Richmond, Virginia, night beat reporter Willie Mays Black knows this will be a big story. And Willie desperately needs a big story. Approaching 50 and thrice-divorced, he knows his long-term employment prospects at the newspaper are rapidly dimming. So, when his former wife Kate agrees to defend the prime suspect in Isabel’s murder—one Martin Fell—and asks for his help in proving the man’s innocence, Willie cannot turn away from the fight. After all, he grew up in Richmond’s hard-scrabble Oregon Hill where he still lives, works, and drinks, and he has some serious doubts about the “confession” obtained by the police. But he never expected the fight to get deadly.Oregon Hill by Howard Owen is a character-driven mystery enhanced by the first-person observations of the very self-aware narrator, Willie Mays Black. Black knows exactly who he is and makes no apologies for his shortcomings. In some respects, he is the male counterpart to Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone—a sarcastic observer of the people and places that define his life. And the more he becomes convinced of Martin Fell’s innocence, the more determined he is to find Isabel’s killer. Black’s outlook on life is shaded by his childhood in Oregon Hill as the son of a single pot-smoking white mother and a black father he never knew. He is not intimidated by the police officers who resent his suggestions in his news blog that there is something suspicious about exactly how they obtained Fell’s confession. As Willie pursues various leads, he must also deal with other people and issues in his life, including his roommate who has been accused of stealing from his neighbors, the layoffs at his newspaper, and his mother’s latest boyfriend who is slowly sliding into dementia. It all makes for an entertaining and colorful mix of character, plot and setting that should please those who enjoy David Rosenfelt’s Andy Carpenter or Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone.

[knittingmomof3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Oregon Hill by Howard Owen is an exciting mystery thriller centered around one newspaper reporter’s investigation into a murder that most others believe to be an open and shut case. Owen gives excellent character introductions, especially of the protagonist, Willie Black, whose earlier reporting days brought him deep within the powerful political circle. Having allowed personal vices get the best of him, Willie is now thankful to be covering the local police scene in Oregon Hill. In essence, his life has come full circle where he now covers the same types of stories that launched his reporting career. And perhaps metaphorically, he likewise uses his rough upbringing and steadfast ways to head down dark alleys that he believes contain the truth behind the beheading of a local college student. Building on the theme of strong-willed reporter working the beat to find answers to questions ignored by others looking for an open and shut case, Owen has turned this story into one with a subtle message of optimism.

[speedy74_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Willie Mays Black is a reporter for the only newspaper in Richmond. His job is on the night cops’ beat, having been demoted from covering the legislature where he refused to get the “story” about a congressman dying of AIDS. Despite Black’s strong code of ethics developed through his lifetime of living on the “hill,” the reader finds that he has more than a few personality flaws. Instead of turning the reader off, these flaws only make him a more believably human and entertaining character. When a young college student is found in the South Anna minus her head, Black must use his knowledge of Oregon Hill culture and history, as well as his 25 years of reporting experience to help solve the case and exonerate the accused whose story just never seems to “add up” for Black.Owen creates a story that is both suspenseful and rich in character development and the feeling of small town life. The main character is both interesting and humorous. I found myself laughing out loud at his sarcasm and ability to see his life for what it is rather than what he dreamed it could be. I especially liked the background on each of the characters from Oregon Hill. Readers who have lived in a small town their whole lives will be able to identify with how Black pieces the true story of the young coed’s murder. I am left with the desire to read the past works of Howard Owen.