HOLLYWOOD

Richmond, Virginia, crime reporter Willie Black tracks down a serial killer who’s apparently been at it for 150 years.

It all starts, or ends, in Hollywood. No, not that Hollywood, but the Hollywood Cemetery, where a corpse shot, stabbed, and draped over the grave of Zacharias Baer, who died in 1869, is identified as that of Joshua Baer, Zacharias’ great-great-grandson. What would already be a tough week for the Baer family takes a turn toward the monstrous with the death of Stonewall Jackson Baer, who’s fatally poisoned at his 100th birthday party. Mark Baer, Jackson’s grandson, is the obvious person for Willie to talk to. But even though Mark was a reporter for the same dying newspaper where Willie works until his coverage of congressional candidate Felicia Delmonico turned into flacking for her, he’s not eager to talk to his former workmate because he’s consumed with grief, because he’s wary of giving out statements that might be used to compromise his family even further, and ultimately because the discovery of the knife that killed Joshua Baer buried in his yard leads to his arrest. Willie’s dogged investigation of the Baer curse, which seems to have struck down a member of every generation since Zacharias, reveals that although the family acknowledges its long history of slaveholding, it’s never owned up to the moral implications of that history. Warning: you’ll need a genealogical table to sort out all the victims, let alone have a shot at identifying the killer.

Forget the tangled whodunit and savor the continued death throes of the hero’s doomed newspaper.