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From the author of Littlejohn: A haunting novel that will “appeal to readers of Southern fiction and to genre fans who favor character-driven crime stories” (Booklist). Littlejohn McCain has been dead eleven years. In that time, his daughter has divorced one husband and buried another. Georgia has reclaimed her original name and believes she is starting to settle comfortably into the last and quietest third of her life. But then she starts seeing her dead father—not just in dreams, but also in her Montclair University classroom. Her son Justin is already down in Scots County, North Carolina, with his pregnant girlfriend, helping prepare what's left of Littlejohn's farm for sale. On the verge of a breakdown, Georgia joins them. As a girl, Georgia couldn't wait to get away from the farm and her moribund hometown. She's back now, but only long enough to sell the former and bid a final, less-than-fond farewell to the latter. Or so she thinks. When her cousin Jenny dies neglected and under mysterious circumstances, Georgia is forced to deal with a major dose of baby-boomer guilt. She's always told herself that she could live with the knowledge that she would never truly “do right” by her older relatives, but now she's not so sure. The “peace that passes understanding” about which the members of her father's old church sing seems far beyond her reach. Georgia, with grandmotherhood and a ghost hovering, tries to discover what really happened to Jenny and partially redeem herself. In the process, she will find two things she never expected in the middle of the dead-calm boredom of East Geddie—requited, taboo-flouting lust and a murder mystery. From the acclaimed author of Oregon Hill, Rock of Ages is “rich in character and place [and] a haunting odyssey toward redemption and repatriation” (Publishers Weekly).

A visionary who dreams about eating kindling wood called “fat lightning” and sees Christ on the Cross in his barn forms an unlikely league with his nephew's frustrated wife in a small Southern town.

Black is back. Willie Black was last seen, in Oregon Hill, risking the final tattered remnants of his checkered careeer - and his life - to free a man almost everyone else believed was guilty. Willie's still covering the night police beat with its DDGBs and dirt naps, still avoiding the hawk that periodically swopps down to pluck away a few more of his colleagues in a floundering business. He still drinks too much, smokes too much. The only thing that keeps him employed: He's a damn fine reporter. Even his beleaguered bosses would concede that. Willie finds himself neck-deep in a part of Richmond that a boy growing up in Oregon Hill could only experience through illicit midnight stories at the city's most exclusive swimming hole. The Quarry was where Alicia Parker Simpson identified Richard Slade as her rapist, 28 years ago. Then, five days after DNA evidence freed Slade from the prison system in which he had spent his adult life, Alicia Simpson is shot to death. Hardly anyone doubts that Richard Slade did it. Who could blame him? But Willie has his doubts. When the full weight of the city's old money falls on him, trying to crush the story, he only becomes more determined to chase the things that always seems to get him in trouble - the truth. The fact that Richard Slade is his cousin, a link to his long-dead African-American father, only makes Willie more tenacious. In the end, Willie will be drawn back to the Philadelphia Quarry, where it all started so long ago and in whose murky waters the truth lies.

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.

No one thought Jack Stone of Speakeasy, Virginia, was the kind of man who would try to solve his problems with a.38. But here he is, on a train to New York, armed and dangerously determined that somebody is going to read his damn novel. Jack once had dreams of bigger things, but here he is, a long-distance trucker with a shaky home life and one last chance to be special. All that the New York editor needs is a little persuasion.

Before he let his life fall apart, James “Neil” Beauchamp was special. He lived and flourished in the world of privilege, adored and accommodated. Then, before he truly learned to appreciate it, the one talent that lifted him from a small life in a small town was gone. The only thing worse than spending your life earthbound, Neil would learn, is landing hard and knowing you'll never fly again. Born in Penns Castle, in the castle itself, he was a prince of sorts. But when his mother left the castle with him in tow, he lost everything, even his name. He seemed destined for a life as a shopkeeper's barely tolerated stepson. That's when baseball presented itself and saved him. For what Neil could do was hit. Through some combination of reflexes, vision, and coordination, the lean and supple Virginia Rail turned the game of his childhood into the driving force of his life. Before he was through, he would win batting championships and be elected to the Hall of Fame. Yet before his talent failed, he already was failing those closest to him. His wife and son suffered from being outside his field of vision too much of the time. Then, with his career over well before his 40th birthday, everything collapsed. The final crash, with his half-sister Blanchard beside him in the car, the crash that sent him to prison, was seen by most who knew him as the inevitable landing at the end of a very long fall. On the day he was paroled, he was met at the prison gates by his son David, the last person Neil expected to see, and returned to the castle from which he was banished as a child and to Blanchard, a woman of tenuous mental balance. Neil is looking for some way to make amends. And his son, who will learn things about Neil he never would have guessed, still wants to salvage something out of their mutual wreckage.

Don't torture yourself, Ruth Crowder Flood has always told Harry Stein. Don't let your life be ruined by what might have been. But he can't help it. And, in truth, neither can she. In the one short moment that was theirs, Ruth had too much pride and Harry didn't have enough courage. In the instant that defined the rest of their lives, they both hesitated and were lost, condemned to wander in a wilderness of their own making. In Harry & Ruth, Howard Owen's fifth novel, two unlikely lovers learn just how much their lives can be defined by one bad decision. They will be seasoned by wars both foreign and domestic, by Washington and state politics, by an Olympic swimmer they've both failed in different ways, by business and financial success—and by two haunted and disastrous marriages. Through it all, Harry and Ruth endure—on paper. They begin writing in the fall of 1942 and never stop. Now it's the fall of 1995, hurricane season again. Ruth Crowder Flood is 70 years old, the matriarch of a damaged, secret-hoarding family. Harry Stein is dying, and he wants to tie up a plenitude of loose ends. All that remains is for some of the famous Crowder family reserve to melt away, so that a disaffected daughter might understand everything, even the mystery of what happened to Henry Flood.

Now available in paperback, comes a successful and beautifully-written novel about a decent North Carolina farmer haunted by errors and redeemed by faith. Painstakingly honest, Littlejohn is'a character as fully rounded in his quirks and imperfections, in his quiet determination and bravery, as any in recent fiction.'--Washington Post. National reading tour.