Kirkus reviews Howard Owen's upcoming novel Oregon Hill
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 Isabell’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.
Willie Black deserves a sequel.
