EVERGREEN

Richmond crime reporter Willie Black accepts a commission to
clean up his unknown father’s grave and ends by cleaning up a whole lot more.

Willie’s never known much about Artie Lee, like where he’s buried
or when and how he died. So when his cousin Philomena Slade, brought to a
hospital she’s clearly not going to leave, says she wants to talk to Willie
about his father, he has decidedly mixed emotions. Of course he’s going to do
whatever he’s asked by his cousin, one of the few truly decent people in his
family tree. But clearing Artie’s plot at Evergreen Cemetery turns out to be
only the tip of the iceberg, for Willie can’t rest until he finds out what put
his father there in the first place. A series of conversations with the
surviving members of the Triple-A’s—Artie’s ancient friends Arthur Meeks and
Arkie Bright—reveals mainly that they really don’t want to talk about the
one-car encounter with a tree that killed Artie back in 1961, when his son was
just learning to walk, and his dying newspaper’s files add precious few
details. Willie’s big discovery concerns the aftermath of a Ku Klux Klan rally
the year before, when a car bombing killed married police officer Phillip
Raynor and his companion, 22-year-old Julia Windham, whom friends said he’d
offered shelter from a thunderstorm that the weather pages from that date don’t
mention. Unearthing the connection between their murders and Artie’s death six
months later would be a challenge under ideal conditions, and Willie’s
conditions—working 57 years later under the watchful eye of Benson Stine, yet
another know-nothing representative of the conglomerate owner MediaWorld, who
loads him with new responsibilities and forbids him to spend any time working
on his own concerns during the paper’s time, which is all the time—are anything
but ideal.

Middling for a series (Scuffletown, 2019, etc.) whose
most distinctive features are its sharp eye for the mixed-race hero’s heavy
burdens, including, but not limited to, the decline and fall of print journalism.