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Tempered Throne
Stewart Finney’s high-risk lifestyle takes a spin into the bizarre when he encounters the Tempered Throne. Then with the guidance of a pushy little blackbird, he meets a retired Hollywood actress, an Elvis-impersonating chauffeur, a scraggly homeless boy named Pig, and ultimately, an enchanting beauty to whom he is hopelessly drawn.
When two acquaintances are murdered in the city, Stewart knows he is next. He tries to find his killer before the killer finds him, but in the meantime Stewart must confront his disreputable past. In his bleakest moment he realizes that he is and always has been in the company of angels.
When two acquaintances are murdered in the city, Stewart knows he is next. He tries to find his killer before the killer finds him, but in the meantime Stewart must confront his disreputable past. In his bleakest moment he realizes that he is and always has been in the company of angels.
284 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 2, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 29, 2014
I just finished reading “Tempered Throne” by Ray Owen. It was a well-conceived piece of literature. This is actually several stories going on simultaneously running parallel to one another but not intersecting for nearly the entire book. The main storyline revolves around Stewart Finney, a high level engineer who displays few redeemable qualities. He is a gambler and thief. Stewart attempted to steal his friend’s wife, tried to kill the same friend and would seem to have an obsessive compulsive disorder about being clean all the time. He is being followed and murders keep happening around him. Then there is a pesky problem he has with birds; particularly blackbirds following him and showing up at the oddest times.
Then there is the story of a young boy named Pig. If ever there was a dysfunctional family poster child, it was Pig. His alcoholic father abuses him physically and emotionally without caring for the boy or his basic needs. The father takes up with Tina, an evil woman who hates Pig even more than his father and makes the boy’s life unbearable. Both stories continue independently until the very end. A word of advice to the reader. Go over the last chapters slowly or you could miss some things. The author took characters that a person would not usually pull for and makes you care about them. He leaves clues along the journeys for you to piece the story together. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. You don’t see what you have until it’s finished. When it is done, though, you will be glad you read it.
Rival Gates
Then there is the story of a young boy named Pig. If ever there was a dysfunctional family poster child, it was Pig. His alcoholic father abuses him physically and emotionally without caring for the boy or his basic needs. The father takes up with Tina, an evil woman who hates Pig even more than his father and makes the boy’s life unbearable. Both stories continue independently until the very end. A word of advice to the reader. Go over the last chapters slowly or you could miss some things. The author took characters that a person would not usually pull for and makes you care about them. He leaves clues along the journeys for you to piece the story together. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. You don’t see what you have until it’s finished. When it is done, though, you will be glad you read it.
Rival Gates
June 25, 2026
I want to start by being honest: I almost didn't finish the first chapter.
Not because it was bad but because it was strange in a way I hadn't made up my mind about yet. Ray Owen drops you into Stewart Finney's world with no apology and no warm-up, and for the first few pages I wasn't sure whether I was in the hands of a writer who knew exactly what he was doing or one who was making it up as he went. By chapter three, I had my answer. This man knows exactly what he's doing.
Tempered Throne is one of those rare novels that defies the neat little category boxes we use to organize fiction. Is it a thriller? A mystery? Magical realism? Spiritual fiction? Southern Gothic? The honest answer is yes all of it, somehow, without any single element overwhelming the others. Owen has an instinct for balance that most writers spend entire careers chasing and never quite catching.
Stewart Finney is a man running from himself, which is really the only kind of running that matters in literature. He carries a past that's vague enough to be universal and specific enough to feel true. You don't need all the details of what he's done Owen gives you the weight of it, the way it sits behind Stewart's eyes, and that's more than enough. What sets Stewart apart from your standard tortured protagonist is that he's not particularly interested in his own redemption. He's not seeking it. He doesn't believe he deserves it. And watching a character be transformed by grace they didn't ask for and wouldn't have accepted if you'd explained it to them in advance that's genuinely affecting storytelling.
The supporting cast is where Owen truly lets loose. The retired Hollywood actress carries the kind of world-weariness that only comes from having been adored by millions and loved by very few. She is sharp, she is funny, and she is heartbreaking in ways the book doesn't always announce out loud. The Elvis-impersonating chauffeur could have been a cheap gag a bit of color, a running joke but Owen refuses to let him stay on the surface. He becomes, inexplicably, one of the more grounded and generous characters in the book, the kind of person who turns out to have been paying attention all along when nobody was watching him.
And then there is Pig. The scraggly homeless boy named Pig is the kind of character you don't forget. He arrives dirty and feral and untrustworthy, and Owen doesn't rush to clean him up for your comfort. He lets Pig be exactly who he is wounded, guarded, fiercely alive and the relationship that develops between Pig and Stewart is, without question, the emotional backbone of the novel. I'm not embarrassed to say that certain scenes between the two of them hit me harder than I expected a book with an Elvis chauffeur to hit me.
The blackbird deserves its own paragraph. The pushy little blackbird that guides Stewart through the story should not work. It is the kind of device that, described in a pitch meeting, would cause reasonable people to walk out of the room. And yet it works. It works completely. Owen handles the bird with exactly the right touch: just enough ambiguity to let you decide for yourself what it means, just enough consistency to give it weight, and just enough personality to make it genuinely entertaining scene to scene. The blackbird is funny and insistent and somehow, by the end, feels like the most important character in the book.
The mystery and thriller elements are competent and engaging two murders, a man who knows he's next, the clock running down but Owen is wise enough to know that the suspense is not the point. The point is what the suspense reveals about Stewart. It forces him into proximity with people he would never have chosen, into situations that crack him open, into a confrontation with his own history that he has been successfully avoiding for years. The killer coming for him is almost a secondary concern by the final act. What Stewart is really racing toward is himself.
The romance, when it arrives, is handled with real tenderness. Owen doesn't rush it, doesn't overwrite it, doesn't turn the woman into a symbol or a reward. She is a full person with her own gravity, and Stewart's attraction to her feels less like desire and more like recognition like meeting someone and knowing, against all your defenses, that this person is going to matter. Whether or not that works out the way either of them wants is something I'll leave for you to discover.
The ending wrecked me. I don't use that word lightly. Owen brings everything together the blackbird, the murders, the ragged little boy, the actress, the chauffeur, the woman in a way that feels both surprising and completely inevitable, which is the hardest trick in fiction to pull off. And then he delivers his thematic hand: that Stewart has been in the company of angels all along, that the strange and broken people orbiting his life were never accidental. I closed the book and sat with it for a long moment.
This is a novel about grace. About the kind of rescue you don't see coming because you've stopped believing you're worth rescuing. Ray Owen, writing out of a barn in Pekin, Indiana, has made something genuinely beautiful. Read it slowly. Let it be strange. Trust it.
Not because it was bad but because it was strange in a way I hadn't made up my mind about yet. Ray Owen drops you into Stewart Finney's world with no apology and no warm-up, and for the first few pages I wasn't sure whether I was in the hands of a writer who knew exactly what he was doing or one who was making it up as he went. By chapter three, I had my answer. This man knows exactly what he's doing.
Tempered Throne is one of those rare novels that defies the neat little category boxes we use to organize fiction. Is it a thriller? A mystery? Magical realism? Spiritual fiction? Southern Gothic? The honest answer is yes all of it, somehow, without any single element overwhelming the others. Owen has an instinct for balance that most writers spend entire careers chasing and never quite catching.
Stewart Finney is a man running from himself, which is really the only kind of running that matters in literature. He carries a past that's vague enough to be universal and specific enough to feel true. You don't need all the details of what he's done Owen gives you the weight of it, the way it sits behind Stewart's eyes, and that's more than enough. What sets Stewart apart from your standard tortured protagonist is that he's not particularly interested in his own redemption. He's not seeking it. He doesn't believe he deserves it. And watching a character be transformed by grace they didn't ask for and wouldn't have accepted if you'd explained it to them in advance that's genuinely affecting storytelling.
The supporting cast is where Owen truly lets loose. The retired Hollywood actress carries the kind of world-weariness that only comes from having been adored by millions and loved by very few. She is sharp, she is funny, and she is heartbreaking in ways the book doesn't always announce out loud. The Elvis-impersonating chauffeur could have been a cheap gag a bit of color, a running joke but Owen refuses to let him stay on the surface. He becomes, inexplicably, one of the more grounded and generous characters in the book, the kind of person who turns out to have been paying attention all along when nobody was watching him.
And then there is Pig. The scraggly homeless boy named Pig is the kind of character you don't forget. He arrives dirty and feral and untrustworthy, and Owen doesn't rush to clean him up for your comfort. He lets Pig be exactly who he is wounded, guarded, fiercely alive and the relationship that develops between Pig and Stewart is, without question, the emotional backbone of the novel. I'm not embarrassed to say that certain scenes between the two of them hit me harder than I expected a book with an Elvis chauffeur to hit me.
The blackbird deserves its own paragraph. The pushy little blackbird that guides Stewart through the story should not work. It is the kind of device that, described in a pitch meeting, would cause reasonable people to walk out of the room. And yet it works. It works completely. Owen handles the bird with exactly the right touch: just enough ambiguity to let you decide for yourself what it means, just enough consistency to give it weight, and just enough personality to make it genuinely entertaining scene to scene. The blackbird is funny and insistent and somehow, by the end, feels like the most important character in the book.
The mystery and thriller elements are competent and engaging two murders, a man who knows he's next, the clock running down but Owen is wise enough to know that the suspense is not the point. The point is what the suspense reveals about Stewart. It forces him into proximity with people he would never have chosen, into situations that crack him open, into a confrontation with his own history that he has been successfully avoiding for years. The killer coming for him is almost a secondary concern by the final act. What Stewart is really racing toward is himself.
The romance, when it arrives, is handled with real tenderness. Owen doesn't rush it, doesn't overwrite it, doesn't turn the woman into a symbol or a reward. She is a full person with her own gravity, and Stewart's attraction to her feels less like desire and more like recognition like meeting someone and knowing, against all your defenses, that this person is going to matter. Whether or not that works out the way either of them wants is something I'll leave for you to discover.
The ending wrecked me. I don't use that word lightly. Owen brings everything together the blackbird, the murders, the ragged little boy, the actress, the chauffeur, the woman in a way that feels both surprising and completely inevitable, which is the hardest trick in fiction to pull off. And then he delivers his thematic hand: that Stewart has been in the company of angels all along, that the strange and broken people orbiting his life were never accidental. I closed the book and sat with it for a long moment.
This is a novel about grace. About the kind of rescue you don't see coming because you've stopped believing you're worth rescuing. Ray Owen, writing out of a barn in Pekin, Indiana, has made something genuinely beautiful. Read it slowly. Let it be strange. Trust it.
July 7, 2026
I don't say this lightly: Tempered Throne is one of the most unexpectedly delightful reading experiences I've had this year, and it's taken me a few days after finishing to figure out exactly why it's stuck with me so persistently. On the surface, Ray Owen's premise sounds almost too eccentric to work a reckless, high risk living protagonist, a pushy little blackbird acting as some kind of otherworldly guide, a retired Hollywood actress with secrets of her own, an Elvis-impersonating chauffeur, and a scraggly homeless boy named Pig. Written out like that, it reads like a fever dream. And yet Owen takes all of these disparate, almost fable like pieces and stitches them into a story that feels not just coherent, but genuinely enchanted.
Let's start with Stewart Finney, because the entire book lives or dies on whether you buy his journey and I bought every second of it. Stewart is introduced as a man who treats danger like a hobby, someone who has built an entire identity around not caring what happens to him. He's brash, a little insufferable in the way that interesting characters often are at the start, and clearly running from something even before the story tells you what. What could have easily become a tired "reckless man learns to feel again" arc instead becomes something much richer, because Owen refuses to rush it. Stewart's transformation isn't a switch that flips; it's a slow erosion of armor, chipped away piece by piece by every strange soul he encounters along the way. By the time he's hopelessly drawn to the story's mysterious, enchanting beauty, that pull doesn't feel like a plot convenience it feels earned, inevitable, the natural result of everything that's cracked him open along the way.
And what a cast surrounds him. The blackbird alone could have been a gimmick in lesser hands, but here it becomes this wonderfully strange thread of magic and mischief running through the narrative, never fully explained in a way that robs it of its charm. The retired Hollywood actress brings a melancholy glamour to the story, a sense of faded lights and old regrets that adds unexpected emotional weight. The Elvis-impersonating chauffeur is pure delight the kind of character who could have just been comic relief but ends up carrying more heart than you'd expect. And Pig, the homeless boy who feels like the story's quiet moral center, broke my heart in the best possible way. Every one of these characters could have starred in their own book, and yet Owen manages to give each of them room to breathe within Stewart's story without ever losing focus.
What impressed me most, though, is the tonal balancing act Owen pulls off from start to finish. This is a novel that can have you laughing out loud at some bit of absurd, perfectly timed dialogue in one chapter, and then quietly wrecking you with a moment of real tenderness in the next. There's a whimsical, almost fable like sensibility running underneath the modern day setting a sense that anything could happen, that the ordinary world is just a thin veil over something stranger and more meaningful and it gives the whole novel a lightness, a sense of magic, without ever tipping over into saccharine or precious territory. That's a hard needle to thread, and Owen threads it with real skill.
The prose itself deserves mention too. Owen writes with an easy, conversational confidence that makes the 332 pages fly by, but he's not afraid to slow down and let a scene breathe when the emotional stakes call for it. There's a rhythm to the way tension and humor and warmth are layered throughout the book that feels intentional rather than accidental like Owen knew exactly when to make you laugh so that the next gut punch would land even harder.
By the final chapters, I genuinely found myself slowing my reading down, not wanting it to end, savoring the last stretch the way you might a good meal you know is almost finished. That's rare. Most books I read quickly because I want to know what happens. This one I read slowly because I didn't want to leave.
Tempered Throne is the kind of book that sneaks up on you funny, strange, tender, occasionally heartbreaking, and ultimately deeply hopeful. It's a story about armor and the people who manage to get underneath it, told through a cast of characters so odd and specific that they end up feeling entirely real. I closed the book with a full heart and an immediate urge to recommend it to absolutely everyone I know who wants their fiction to have a little soul in it. Highly, highly recommended.
Let's start with Stewart Finney, because the entire book lives or dies on whether you buy his journey and I bought every second of it. Stewart is introduced as a man who treats danger like a hobby, someone who has built an entire identity around not caring what happens to him. He's brash, a little insufferable in the way that interesting characters often are at the start, and clearly running from something even before the story tells you what. What could have easily become a tired "reckless man learns to feel again" arc instead becomes something much richer, because Owen refuses to rush it. Stewart's transformation isn't a switch that flips; it's a slow erosion of armor, chipped away piece by piece by every strange soul he encounters along the way. By the time he's hopelessly drawn to the story's mysterious, enchanting beauty, that pull doesn't feel like a plot convenience it feels earned, inevitable, the natural result of everything that's cracked him open along the way.
And what a cast surrounds him. The blackbird alone could have been a gimmick in lesser hands, but here it becomes this wonderfully strange thread of magic and mischief running through the narrative, never fully explained in a way that robs it of its charm. The retired Hollywood actress brings a melancholy glamour to the story, a sense of faded lights and old regrets that adds unexpected emotional weight. The Elvis-impersonating chauffeur is pure delight the kind of character who could have just been comic relief but ends up carrying more heart than you'd expect. And Pig, the homeless boy who feels like the story's quiet moral center, broke my heart in the best possible way. Every one of these characters could have starred in their own book, and yet Owen manages to give each of them room to breathe within Stewart's story without ever losing focus.
What impressed me most, though, is the tonal balancing act Owen pulls off from start to finish. This is a novel that can have you laughing out loud at some bit of absurd, perfectly timed dialogue in one chapter, and then quietly wrecking you with a moment of real tenderness in the next. There's a whimsical, almost fable like sensibility running underneath the modern day setting a sense that anything could happen, that the ordinary world is just a thin veil over something stranger and more meaningful and it gives the whole novel a lightness, a sense of magic, without ever tipping over into saccharine or precious territory. That's a hard needle to thread, and Owen threads it with real skill.
The prose itself deserves mention too. Owen writes with an easy, conversational confidence that makes the 332 pages fly by, but he's not afraid to slow down and let a scene breathe when the emotional stakes call for it. There's a rhythm to the way tension and humor and warmth are layered throughout the book that feels intentional rather than accidental like Owen knew exactly when to make you laugh so that the next gut punch would land even harder.
By the final chapters, I genuinely found myself slowing my reading down, not wanting it to end, savoring the last stretch the way you might a good meal you know is almost finished. That's rare. Most books I read quickly because I want to know what happens. This one I read slowly because I didn't want to leave.
Tempered Throne is the kind of book that sneaks up on you funny, strange, tender, occasionally heartbreaking, and ultimately deeply hopeful. It's a story about armor and the people who manage to get underneath it, told through a cast of characters so odd and specific that they end up feeling entirely real. I closed the book with a full heart and an immediate urge to recommend it to absolutely everyone I know who wants their fiction to have a little soul in it. Highly, highly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews