Belle Isle: A Willie Black Mystery

At the start of Owen’s well-plotted ninth Willie Black mystery (after 2019’s Evergreen), Willie, a world-weary, thrice-divorced, 58-year-old newspaper reporter in Richmond, Va., gets a call from an old buddy on Belle Isle, a park in the James River, who tells him, “There’s something over here you gotta see. It’s a leg.” The leg turns out to belong to Teddy “T-Bone” Delmonico, a former NFL player. Teddy “was apparently beaten to death and then dismembered by coyotes,”; his wife is running for a seat in the House of Representatives, with the election just two weeks away. Meanwhile, Mills Farrington, a former associate of Teddy, who has spent time in country club prison for fraud, goes missing, and a little investigation uncovers some ugly things about Teddy. Motives abound, and there are plenty of clues. Vivid, snappy repartee-spouting characters support Willie, whose poignant and witty observations on newsroom shenanigans, the current political climate, and the slow, inevitable decline of print media are funny and thought-provoking. Fans of contemporary regional mysteries are in for a treat. (Aug.)