VIRGINIA

-- Benny Assissi is having an awful year. His job has been outsourced, he's working the night shift at a convenience store, his son is dying, and he has just been robbed.

And that's just the beginning of the horror in Low Man (272 pages, Leucrota Press, $12.95), a product of Virginia Commonwealth University graduate T.J. Vargo's rich imagination.

Vargo, a marketing and public-relations professional in Ohio, invests this novel with a wealth of chills, plausible characters and more than a hint of evil.

. . .

Think Civil War novels, and "Gone With the Wind" probably comes to mind first -- a classic, beloved book marred by the racism of its author Margaret Mitchell's times.

Los Angeles author David Fuller takes a far different approach in his debut novel, Sweetsmoke (310 pages, Hyperion, $24.95). Set on a Virginia tobacco plantation, it tells the story through a slave, Cassius Howard, who risks his life to try to learn the truth concerning the murder of Emoline, a free black woman who secretly taught him to read and once saved his life.

Fuller's stake in this novel is intensely personal. Its conception occurred when he learned that an ancestor, Confederate Gen. Turner Ashby, had owned slaves. Eight years of research followed, and the result is a gripping tale.

. . .

Kentucky may be the site of the world's most renowned horse race, but Virginia is no slacker in the field, as Virginia C. Johnson and Barbara Crookshanks show in Virginia Horse Racing: Triumphs of the Turf (160 pages, The History Press, $19.99).

The authors begin their story with the arrival of six mares and a stallion in Jamestown in 1611 and run through the opening of Colonial Downs in New Kent County. Along the way, they tell fascinating tales that will interest not only equine enthusiasts but also history buffs.

Johnson is a graduate of the College of William and Mary and is Web-content librarian at the Central Rappahannock Regional Library in Fredericksburg. Crookshanks, a freelance writer in Fredericksburg, has worked for the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star and as the longtime editor of Fredericksburg Times magazine.

-- Jay Strafford