RIVER CITY BLUES

“Our city of Richmond, VA has been changing rapidly these last ten years. We are in urgent need of storytellers to hold memory and remind us of what it used to be. With River City Blues, Ward Howarth has done exactly that. However, this is not a history lesson, it’s a detective novel set during WWII. Through loving research, Ward has transformed Richmond into a playground. It’s an exhilarating romp, at least it would be, if our traumatized hero, Detective Bennie Sherwood, wasn’t continually having violent flashbacks of his time in the green hell of Guadalcanal. Plagued by the ghosts of Japanese snipers as he chases leads on a double murder at the Apollo Hotel, the chapters ratchet up the tension as Bennie works double duty trying to solve the murder of his father. Nestled between fallen heroes and a knight’s errand, the line of moral ambiguity fluctuates wildly from good guys to bad, from what’s legal to the right thing to do. It’s really everything you could possibly want in a detective novel.”

— Clay Blancett, Author of Whiteboy

It's early 1944 and Richmond, Virginia is a devil's paradise. Ration scams and police corruption are rampant while the inflated black market commands top dollar.

Detective Sergeant Bennie Sherwood, fresh off a soul-scarring tour of duty with the Marines, couldn't care less. His old man was recently murdered under suspect circumstances and he's on a hunt for the truth.

But then an old friend is killed during a botched black market raid and Bennie is thrust onto a hellride through Richmond's underworld. Suddenly, he's at the front lines of a new kind of war, one that's played out in gentlemen's clubs and back alleys between tobacco kingpins and numbers runners.

It's a dark, twisted journey that will test Bennie's every limit, even as it gets him closer to the truth about his father.