Highway Robbery

Owen Allison #2

by John Billheimer

When a highway construction crew uncovers human remains, the subsequent investigation has everyone in town on the edge of their seats, including the environmentalists protesting the creation of the roadway.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction

290 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2000

Reviews

[Jeannine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the first book in this series and loved it. This one is no exception. For someone who usually balances her reading between hard 's core detective novels and cozies, this series doesn't fit the mold. They take place in West Virginia and the main character is a civil engineer. But there is mystery, mayhem, humor and a great sense of the diversity of this state. My mother's family was from this area of West Virginia and I see them in some of the characters. My cousin and I also had the pleasure of meeting and talking to Mr. Billheimer several years ago at the Virginia Festival of the Book so I guess I am biased....but in a good way!

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Typical whodunit set against Highway construction corruption in West Virginia. It was a decent read but nothing I felt was exceptional.

[Brian O'Leary · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surprisingly good, quick read, amateur sleuth book.

[Luke Teel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this series. The way the dialogue is written is a little corny to me, but the plot of both of the novels I’ve read so far is fantastic and keeps me turning the pages. Looking forward to the next one in the series!

[A. Bowdoin Van Riper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Highway Robbery is a familiar story, set against an unfamiliar background. How much you enjoy it will depend a lot on your level of tolerance for the first, and your level of interest in the second. The hero, Owen Allison, is a civil engineer who (temporarily) leaves behind an unhappy life in California to return to his West Virginia hometown. Excavation for a new road has turned up what may be the body of his father—the incorruptible chief engineer of the county highway department, swept away by a flood-swollen river decades before—and his “accidental” death is starting to look like murder. Owen’s amateur sleuthing, and the exposure of other long-buried things, leads to murder and the threat of murder, confessions, and revelations about who people are (or were) when nobody’s watching.

Billheimer deftly handles the West Virginia locales, the brooding presence of the past, and the awkwardness of coming home after a long time away. The political and business shenanigans on which the plot turns are fresh and fascinating. The mystery is complicated and the clues innovative, but the process of working it all out feels stale and perfunctory. Nearly all the lives in the story (with one gratuitous, awkward exception) follow utterly predictable arcs, and most of the revelations are more surprising to the characters than they will be to longtime mystery readers. The identity of the murderer, and the climactic confrontation, feel particularly slack; you’ve seen it before, done better, in the last ten minutes of a hundred different TV episodes.

After the shaky climax, however, the book ends by playing to its strengths, winding down with a pair of sharply observed scenes where the gulf between Owen and the place he left behind closes a little. That, and the good bits that went before, was enough to leave me wanting to pick up another Owen Allison story sometime.

[Clark Lohr · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was on an author panel with John Billheimer recently, at Left Coast Crime 2013, in Colorado Springs. On the way there, I listened to Highway Robbery on my Kindle. It's one of a half-dozen mysteries Billheimer has written while running a business in California that guys like him with Phd's from Stanford run. But Billheimer grew up in West Virginia, in the South, a region those of us who live elsewhere enjoy stereotyping as ground zero for hordes of six-fingered, green jello sucking hillbillies--with occasional exceptions, like William Faulkner or Maya Angelou or you pick one.

Highway Robbery is an intelligent, soulful book. It's a treasury of Southern humor and Southern speech ("I got more buckshot than you got hide")and a kind of tribute to a part of the contemporary South, that being West Virginia, where the book's main character has returned, bedeviled by his present and haunted by his past,so to speak, to deal with all of it--the estranged wife, the old girlfriend, his mother,a funny and tragic best friend from his youth-- and a set of bones, believed to be those of his father, which came out of the ground on a highway building project--and it is the road building business in the South that gives Billheimer a focal point for an erudite commentary on institutional corruption, revealing, to risk another pat phrase here, a dark past, and, for the purposes of Highway Robbery, a darker present.

[Maddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

PROTAGONIST: Owen Allison
SETTING: West Virginia
SERIES: #2 of 4
RATING: 3.5
WHY: Owen Allison's mother has asked him to return to West Virginia from California out of concern for his older brother George, who is the state highway commissioner. George has been fighting the bureaucrats over the design of a bridge; the one they're supporting is not safe. When an environmentalist who has confronted George is murdered, he is found nearby in an alcoholic stupor and thus the prime suspect. The plot gets overly complicated when the deaths of Owen's father and his best friend's father 35 years earlier come into play, and the cast grows rather unwieldy. The main characters are well drawn, and humor well integrated.

[Pat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started slow, got better and was a good book.
West Virginia road construction tale.
Murder, corruption due to federal money.
Owen's father died in flood, or did he.
Owen goes home to help brother and solves murders as well.

[David Freas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Any book not set in New York City, Los Angeles, or any other large metropolis is worth a read in my opinion.

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