Evergreen: A Willie Black Mystery

In Owen’s low-key eighth Willie Black mystery (after Scuffletown), a dying relative unexpectedly asks Willie, a Richmond, Va., crime reporter, to take over as caretaker of his father’s grave in Evergreen, the city’s historic African-American cemetery. As a child of mixed-race parents prohibited from marrying by Virginia racial laws, Willie knows virtually nothing about his father, Artie Lee, other than that he died in an auto accident in 1961, when Willie was an infant. Prompted by curiosity to look up the details of the accident, he soon faces some puzzling questions: Why are his elderly mother and Artie’s surviving friends reluctant to talk about what happened? And why does the police chief direct his attention to a deadly explosion that took place at a Ku Klux Klan rally the year before the accident? Willie’s plunge into the city’s racially turbulent past generates little suspense, and only toward the end do the strands come together for an emotionally satisfying conclusion. Willie, meanwhile, remains the same witty and humane character as ever. Readers will hope he has a long run. (July)