When Ghosts Come Home by Wiley Cash

 

When Ghosts Come Home by Wiley Cash is a page-turner of a novel. One night in October of 1984, Sheriff Winston Barnes and his wife are startled from their sleep by what sounds like a low-flying plane at a nearby airfield. When he goes to investigate, he finds a large airplane sitting sideways on the runway with no crew or cargo as well as a local man lying dead in the grass near the plane.

On this coastal island of North Carolina, rumors begin to fly as the sheriff investigates the mystery of the plane and the murder. Because the dead man is the son of a local civil rights leader, unresolved race relations heat up in the town.  The widow’s home is attacked by a mob with the Confederate flag flying that throws something through a window and threatens the life of her brother. The civil rights leader demands more from the sheriff than he can deliver legally.

On the home front, the sheriff’s wife is battling cancer, and their grown daughter has returned home after the death of her child. The sheriff is up for re-election within a week, and the support for the office seems to be behind his opposing candidate, Brad Frye, a known bigot, with even Barnes’ deputies showing divided loyalty. The sheriff really needs to bring this investigation to a satisfying resolution if he has any hope of retaining the office.

Complicating the investigation is the arrival of the FBI, ready to take over the case. With all resources stretched to the limit, Sheriff Barnes must balance work and home and keep the racial tensions from erupting while figuring out the right thing to do as all the pieces come together in this tension-filled narrative.

Wiley Cash teaches fiction writing and literature at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, where he serves as Alumni Author-in-Residence. The best-selling author of The Last Ballad, A Land More Kind than Home, and This Dark Road to Mercy, he lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughters.  

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting July 26, 2021.

I would like to thank William Morrow and Custom House and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.