In the fall of 1967, Grayson Melvin met the girl of his dreams. Annie Lineberger was so far out his league that he felt like she was playing an entirely different game, but somehow he won her affections. He couldn't believe his good luck while it lasted. They both were 18, but Grayson was a baby, and Annie had been around. She was beautiful, smart and funny. When she told him she loved him, he would have died for her, right then and there. Instead, Annie died, or at least disappeared from the face of the earth. On the same night when she broke Grayson's teenage heart by giving him his walking papers, she vanished. Everyone believed he killed her. Without a body, though, nothing could be proved. And so Grayson Melvin lived his life. Kicked out of his university, he went from the Army and Vietnam to bartending to another college to newspapers, where he discovered that Annie's well-connected and vengeful family still had the power to step into his stunted life and punish him. Then, in

A familiar name piques Willie Black's interest on a slow news day: Scuffletown Park. He and the first of his four wives lived next to the pocket park when they were young and still on speaking terms. Now, Scuffletown is the site of a crime scene, one that doesn t fit the usual modus operandi for Richmond. For one thing, there's plenty of blood but no body. Also, it seems that a knife was involved, a rarity Willie's gun-happy city. And, Scuffletown is in the heart of the Fan, where violence is a blessedly rare occurrence. Before long there is a body. There also is a neighbor who caught the deed on his iPhone camera. When his old friend and current police flack Peachy Love gives Willie a sneak peek at the remarkably clear photograph, he starts wishing he'd never seen Scuffletown Park again. How is it possible that Abe Custalow is standing over what appears to be a very dead body? Abe has been sharing Willie Black's condo since Willie found his childhood pal living homeless in...

Life is cheap on the poor side of town. For more than two decades, young black kids have been disappearing from Richmond's East End. No bodies have ever been found, and the missing boys haven't received much attention from police or the media. When the uncle of the latest missing kid takes matters into his own hands and holds the daily newspaper's publisher hostage in the paper's lobby, Willie Black gets involved, and things start to change. The world's oldest night cops reporter knows something about the inequities of race and income. When Sam McNish, a crusader for social justice who grew up in the same hardscrabble Oregon Hill neighborhood as Willie, is arrested shortly after a child's body is discovered, the police start making the case that McNish has been the demonic force behind all the boys' disappearances. Willie, after working the traps he's developed from his too-many years as a night police reporter, isn't so sure. As Willie teases out the real story, he manages to...

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...

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.From the Trade Paperback edition.

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.

Richmond is in a panic. For the fourth time in eighteen months, a young girl or woman has been brutalized and murdered. This time, the body of a fourteen-year-old is found in Richmond's Shockoe Bottom train station. On her ankle is the same perversely cartoonish tattoo that has led the cops and newspapers to dub the perpetrator the Tweety Bird killer. When Willie Black finds out that the night security guy at the station was lured away from his post by a phone call from Willie's daughter just before the body was dumped, the story gets weirder and a lot more personal. When the police arrest Ronnie Sax, a photographer who used to work at Willie's paper, for the murders, the evidence seems overwhelming. But then Willie starts getting letters from someone who seems to know more about the killings than an innocent bystander should.

Les Hacker doesn't seem to have an enemy in the world—other than whoever tried to kill him with a high-powered rifle while he was sitting on a park bench six floors below Willie Black's living room window. Les is the closest thing Willie has had to a father figure in a checkered life of drinking, divorces and journalism. He certainly has better qualifications than any of the other men Willie's mother, Peggy, took in over the years. Of course, as Willie would say, that would only make him a tall midget.Now, with Les clinging to life, Willie decides to take a short sabbatical and do a story about his surrogate dad and the last minor league baseball team Les played on, the 1964 Richmond Virginians.There's only one problem. As Willie tries to get in touch with other members of that team, he discovers that they are almost all below ground, most of them long before their allotted three-score and ten years.

DNA evidence establishes the innocence of Richard Slade, who has served 27 years for the rape of Alicia Parker Simpson, who was just 16 at the time of the crime. Simpson, a member of a wealthy white family, identified Slade, a poor 17-year-old black, as her attacker. As Willie puts it, "When it came time to step up for Richard Slade, everybody stepped back." Slade has a brief taste of freedom before he's arrested for the shooting death of Simpson. Willie, hard-drinking, thrice divorced, and debt-ridden, has an unquenchable thirst for truth that drives him to prevent a second miscarriage of justice. Along the way, he uncovers a Greek tragedy's worth of murky relationships.