Jordan's Branch

When Willie Black finds an old acquaintance brutally murdered in the man's rental house in Westwood, it's personal. Willie was being paid to write Stick Davis's memoirs, but now Stick's dead, the memoir is half-written and Willie's out a promised $40,000. In addition, Police Chief and frenemy L.D. Jones considers Willie a prime suspect in the homicide. Westwood abuts the covered-over site of a creek with a history. Jordan's Branch isn't much these days, forgotten or never known by most of Richmond's residents. It runs mostly unnoticed through and occasionally under the city on its way to the Chickahominy River. It has a past, though, harking back to the days when former slaves established a community on its banks, using the stream for everything from drinking water to baptisms. Jordan's Branch is where Willie Black will come face-to-face with the Purifiers, a neo-Nazi group that wants to make racial war with those Jordan's Branch pioneers and their descendants. In his effort to...