Henry Wise Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Henry Wise is a published author known for his debut novel, Holy City.

He attended the Virginia Military Institute and graduated, and then repeated the experience with the University of Mississippi MFA program.

Henry is a writer that has written in different genres, he has also written poetry that has been featured in publications such as Radar Poetry, Shenandoah, Clackamas, Nixes Mate Review, and other places. He has also written nonfiction and this and his photography have made an appearance in Southern Cultures.

Holy City is a 2024 novel by Henry Wise. This is a book that S.A. Cosby says is ‘an amazing piece of work’! Check it out and see what you think and catch the latest from one of the newest voices in fiction.

This is a debut novel from Henry Wise that focuses on a deputy sheriff who has to work with an unpredictable private detective when he finds himself on the outs with his sheriff’s department because of his unwillingness to turn the other way when what he believes to be an innocent man is arrested on cause of murder.

After being exiled for a decade precipitated by the passing of his mother, Will Seems decides to move from Richmond to come home to rural southern Virginia. There he has accepted a job working as a deputy sheriff in a place that has plenty of crime and defeat.

The landscape is full of poverty and has an air of being abandoned. It contains tobacco plantations, forests that have been razed, and homes that are boarded up and left behind. It seems like it’s entirely stuck in the past in a state that is doing its best to try and move past the complex history that it has experienced.

Will is doing his best to try and do things and go about his life, but his plans are thwarted when a mysterious homicide takes the life of Tom Janders, an old friend. This event makes Will face the true reason for the reason he returned. He didn’t come back to honor the memory of his mother but instead primarily to attempt to pay a debt back to a Black friend who long ago had made a choice to protect will in an act of courage and went through permanent disfigurement due to it.

Then there is a man that Will believes to be innocent that is taken in on accusation of murdering Tom. Will does his best to stick up for him but despite all of his pleas, it appears that his boss is all too happy to just conclude the case and move on.

Will now has to contend with weighing his own guilt against his duty to the public when the Black community decides to hire Bennico Watts. Watts is a private detective from Richmond who is somewhat unpredictable, and she was hired to help Will catch the killer.

At first it seems like a good match up for the two of them. She has a lot of experience, and Will has the inner details of the case. But as good as they appear to be on paper, the two of them do not have to collaborate together long before they start to figure out that they would prefer to work on their own if given the choice.

Bennico and Will end up clashing as they both work to defend their own ways of doing things while on a ride that takes them out deep into the underworld wilderness of Snakefoot that has been a reliable hideout for outcasts for hundreds of years.

At the end of this little excursion, the two of them may just figure out that this is a unique place that does not allow always for innocence, freedom, or anything being sacred. Read Holy City by Henry Wise to go on the ride with Bennico and Will and find out what happens!