Laburnum

Hardcover 228 pages Pub Date December 2024 A body is left dangling from the upper floor of a historic Richmond mansion. The victim turns out to be a staunch gun-rights  advocate in the state legislature. While the cops are trying to figure out who and why, Willie Black is hot on their heels, going after a story for his floundering newspaper and maybe coincidentally abetting the pursuit of justice. Willie’s chase leads him to two sisters with a grudge who are tidying up a few loose ends.  Laburnum, the latest Willie Black mystery, takes readers on a cook’s tour of old Richmond, where the past never seems to die and old scores from long-ago family feuds get settled, sometimes in spectacularly gruesome ways.  Jordan Wilkes and Carrington Ranier are two women who saw their childhood dream world turn into a nightmare when what they believed was their rightful inheritance was yanked away from them.  They don’t know if they’ll get away with it, but as Willie and the police learn, they’ve passed the point where they might really have given a damn.  As Willie continues to hang on to a night-cops reporting position  that gets less rewarding by the year, he finds out that unemployment could be the least of his potential worries.   This is Howard Owen’s 24th novel and the 14th in the Willie Black mystery series. Owen, a longtime newspaperman, worked at everything from reporter to sports editor to editorial pages editor. He has been writing fiction since 1989. He and his wife, Karen, live in Richmond. Among his earlier novels are the best-selling Littlejohn and the Willie Black mystery, Oregon Hill, which won the Dashiell Hammett prize for best crime literature in the United States and Canada.