Howard Owen Books in Order

A North Carolina farmer looks back on a life marked by hard work, regret, and stubborn grace as his family gathers around him. Told across three generations, it is both a family story and a reckoning with the past.

Lot Chastain's barn seems to bear the image of Jesus, and the small town of Monacan erupts. As tourists, greed, and religious fervor gather around the spectacle, outsiders and family members get pulled into a darkly comic mess.

Lucky turns back toward his family in search of answers he has avoided for years. Facing his brother, his distant father, and the bruises of a poor Southern upbringing, he tries to find some kind of emotional reckoning.

After personal tragedy leaves Walker Fann adrift, he is pulled into a bitter racial conflict in a Southern town. As arguments over history and responsibility sharpen, Walker is forced to face his family, his conscience, and himself.

Harry Stein and Ruth Crowder fall in love in wartime North Carolina, then spend decades living with the consequences of a choice they could never undo. Their late-life reunion is tender, painful, and tangled up with family secrets.

Fresh out of prison, former baseball star Neil Beauchamp tries to reconnect with his son and the half-sister he barely knows. Old family resentments, buried secrets, and the long shadow of his glory days make the homecoming anything but easy.

A man in midlife finds his imagination becoming both a lifeline and a threat. As obsession and possibility start to blur, he has to decide whether the voice pushing him forward is madness or the chance to change his life.

Georgia McCain returns to Scotland County to sell the family farm and bury the past, then gets pulled into a cousin's suspicious death. Ghosts, guilt, and late-in-life desire turn her homecoming into something far more dangerous.

George James and Freeman Hawk were college friends divided by class, politics, and the unfinished business of the 1960s. Decades later, old loyalties, private grief, and the choices they once made return with painful force.

Demoted back to the night cops beat, Willie Black refuses to accept an easy arrest in the murder of a college student. His reporting drags him through old neighborhood grudges and a reckoning rooted deep in Oregon Hill.

Five days after DNA frees Richard Slade, the woman who accused him of rape is found shot dead. Willie Black doubts the obvious story and follows the case into Richmond privilege, buried history, and the murky waters of the Quarry.

When Willie's surrogate father is shot, he starts tracing the lives of a forgotten 1964 minor league team. What looks like a simple case opens into a strange pattern of deaths and a mystery nobody else wants to touch.

A serial killer case becomes personal when a murdered girl's body is dumped at Shockoe Bottom after a phone call linked to Willie's daughter. At the same time, Willie battles a developer whose plans threaten Richmond's buried history.

When a missing boy from Richmond's East End finally forces attention, Willie Black starts asking why so many Black children have vanished unnoticed. His search collides with city politics, old wounds, and a case the police may be eager to close.

After a small plane crashes into a Richmond bar, Willie Black chases the question that survives the wreckage: why? The case turns personal fast, and his search leads from city rumor to a hidden life on the Chesapeake.

Nearly fifty years after Annie Lineberger vanished, her bones are found and Grayson Melvin becomes the suspect all over again. With only a recovered class ring and his own persistence, he sets out to prove what really happened that night.

A dying woman asks Willie Black to tend his father's grave, sending him into Richmond's abandoned Evergreen Cemetery. The search for Artie Lee becomes a search through family history, buried secrets, and truths Willie may wish he never found.

Blood in Scuffletown Park turns into trouble when a photo seems to show Willie's old friend Abe Custalow standing over a corpse. To save Abe, Willie digs into a case his friend desperately wants left alone.

A severed leg found on Belle Isle pulls Willie Black into the death of former football star Teddy Delmonico. With politics, money, and old grudges swirling around the victim, Willie has to sort through a crowded field of suspects.

When Willie Black is found near the murder of memoir subject Stick Davis, he has to clear his own name. His digging leads him into Richmond history and a violent neo-Nazi plot rooted along the nearly forgotten Jordan's Branch creek.

During Richmond's pandemic lockdown and monument protests, Willie Black investigates the murder of a bookstore-owning couple. The easy suspect is the autistic son of Willie's ex-wife, and Willie can't shake the feeling the police have the wrong man.

A corpse on a tombstone in Hollywood Cemetery and a tycoon's sudden death look unrelated, but Willie Black isn't buying it. His reporting uncovers a connection between present-day murder and old Richmond grievances that never really died.