“WHEN GHOSTS COME HOME” by Wiley Cash (William Morrow, 304 pages, $29).
Wiley Cash, author of “A Land More Kind Than Home,” “This Dark Road to Mercy” and “The Last Ballad,” returns with his latest offering, the warm and immensely readable “When Ghosts Come Home.”
Set in 1984 in the small North Carolina coastal town of Oak Island, “When Ghosts Come Home” opens as an early-morning, low-flying airplane awakens 63-year-old Winston Barnes and his cancer-stricken wife, Marie. Although Winston, the town’s principled and kind sheriff, already has a peculiar feeling and tells his beloved Marie that he is going to the airport to investigate, a phone call from dispatch, which hints at a possible plane crash, quickly spurs him into action.
When Sheriff Barnes arrives, he indeed finds a crashed, oddly empty plane, but the plane’s condition isn’t the only mystery the sheriff has on his hands. Nearby, he uncovers the body of Rodney Bellamy, a Black man who is the son of a local high school history teacher and civil-rights leader, killed by a gunshot. Deputies and others who soon arrive on the scene are quick to link the two as being the result of a drug deal gone bad, but Sheriff Barnes isn’t so sure. He believes something else might very well be afoot on Oak Island – something involving people few others would ever suspect.
While “When Ghosts Come Home” is very much a mystery novel – one that demands (and delivers) answers – readers should go into the book knowing that there is much more within these pages than a simple mystery to be solved. This is a book rich in character that also expertly weaves subplots dealing with politics, corruption and racism.