So much more than a mystery set in a small North Carolina coastal town, Cash’s latest book takes on the racial prejudices and corruption. Winston Barnes, is the town’s kindly, ethical sheriff. When a plain crashes at the airport in the middle of the night, he discovers the body of a dead Black man and an empty cargo plane. A bigoted opponent in the upcoming election for sheriff spreads the word that the young man found is involved in the sale of narcotics. Winston, working with the FBI, struggles to find leads in the murder. Along with this he’s also dealing with arson fires in the development owned by Bradley Frye, his opponent in the sheriff’s election, the return of his daughter, Colleen, after the stillborn death of her baby, and his beloved wife’s cancer. The conclusion will bring a satisfying if sad ending to the story and justice prevails. JD Jackson’s narration brings a feeling of the slower pace of the south and authenticity to the storyline.

This novel begins with a plane crash in a small North Carolina town. When our protagonist Sheriff Winston Barnes goes to see what is going on he finds that plane without a pilot, but a local man is found near the scene shot dead. This starts off this literary mystery.

This sets up a who-done-it where everybody is a suspect. We are not sure if this is a racially driven crime. Barnes is facing demons of times past, a re-election that seems all but lost and the return of his daughter who is dealing with serious issues.

The characters were so well written, there was not a main or supporting character that I did not sympathize with. With lush storytelling thee is so much to draw from. My one fault with this book is the ending, I absolutely hated it, but I am sure that is what Cash wanted us to feel.

Thank you NetGalley and William Morrow for an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is my first book by Wiley Cash. Not sure why - and will definitely be reading more!

I love that it's based in North Carolina (with mentions of Gastonia, Charlotte, etc) and set in Oak Island.

A loud sound, later confirmed to be an airplane crash, awakes Sheriff Winston and his wife. When he goes to investigate, he finds it is much more than just a plane crash. The plane is empty, no prints, no sign of anyone. Except a dead body on the ground near the plane.

There is a lot of mystery and even sad themes (cancer, loss of a child, family struggles in general).
The writing was superb and it kept me hanging on and I finished this one in a day.

The ending had a huge twist and and I finished with a "WHAT?!" but not in a bad way. I loved his writing style and felt myself invested in the characters and what would happen. I will definitely be checking out other books by this author.

Thanks to NetGalley and William Morrow and Custom House for an advance read copy in exchange for my honest review.

The novel is set in a small, rural North Carolina town where Sheriff Winston Barnes is dealing with a wife uffering wih cancer, a daughter who’s suffering with post-partum depression after losing a child, and is not favored to retain his position in the upcoming election. His opponent is a much younger, privileged, bully of “Good Ole Boy” persuasion who brazenly flaunts his privilege and spews racist opinions openly without reservation. When the son of a local respected African-American educator is found murdered at the site of a late-night plane crash, drugs, and foul play are immediately suspected prompting FBI involvement.

This is a character-driven novel that shifts from varying points of view as the Sherriff struggles to retain some control of the investigation, locate the murderer(s), and win an election. The supporting characters have their fair share of internal struggles and intricate ties to the investigation.

While I found the ending satisfying, I felt it was a bit rushed considering how much time is spent earlier in the novel on plot and character development. I enjoyed my time with the novel and will read more of this author again.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an opportunity to read and review!

Cash is an excellent writer, but for most of the book I was just wondering where he was going with the story. Then BOOM! Everything happens (or rather a summary of what happens) in the last two pages. I would have preferred to actually read about those more exciting plot details instead of just getting a short preview of what came to be.

Cash packs a lot into this southern mystery. As the mystery of a plane crash in the middle of the night that turns into a crime scene unravels, underlying themes of racism and corruption come into play. One can’t help but root for the long time local sheriff as he races to solve the crime before the upcoming election. Plot twists leave it hard to decipher the ending.

It begins when the roar of a low-flying plane awakens Sheriff Winston Barnes in the middle of the night and then he finds a dead body at the scene of the crash. In the course of solving the mystery we have racial tensions, likeable and sympathetic characters and wonderful story telling. I finished it in one sitting because I had to see it through to the end.

Wiley Cash is a master at Southern Fiction. His stories touch all the senses - seeing what the character sees, feeling what the character feels, and hearing what the character hears. Each word selected both deliberately and intentionally. Pure and simple, brilliant storytelling.

At the base of this story is a mystery. A mysterious plane crashed in the middle of the night - no pilot, no cargo, but a dead Black man who was a new father, husband, and beloved community member. Cause of death? A gunshot. Was he involved? Was he simply a bystander? Did he see the crash and try to help? And what was the cargo - drugs? Guns?

This mystery is a perfect example of a slow burn executed exceptionally well. The mystery itself layers fittingly through the character-driven story, which is the true heart of this novel. The people of Oak Island feel like real people with real problems. Each character loves deeply but is scarred by life’s consequences even deeper. Genuine people that you can't help but root for. His immersive third-person narrative offers a deep head dive into personal themes of family bonds, grief, and addiction.

You would think this would be enough for a good book, but Wiley Cash sets the mystery in the south during the mid-1980s. His writing captures social issues of race, prejudice, bigotry, and class inequities that still haven't been solved today. These themes only elevate the story rather than bog it down.

I highly recommend this family saga told within a mystery and added social commentary that will pull at your heartstrings. It's emotionally complex and should be savored! Congrats Wiley Cash! Your novels moved into the auto-buy column!

Wiley Cash is a masterful storyteller! His latest novel is beautifully written and a heartbreaking story. There is a layer of profound sadness that runs through it, so you need to be ready for that. Both the book and the audiobook are equally terrific.Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I did enjoy this book for the most part. It just didn't wow me like Wiley Cash's other books. And that ending! There was very little build up to a pivotal ending. The ending happened quickly and was just over and totally fell flat. Not a good ending at all.

I should have finished this book quickly, but I was distracted by life.
I've been a fan of Wiley Cash since I read his first book. I've hunted him down at book events and have grown increasingly enamored of his gift of story telling. This book is no different. It's not just the story of a mysterious airplane, and a shooting. It's about small town politics and racism and segregation and the big and small things that make life difficult. As I was reading this I felt so much empathy for the Sheriff and his family, for the shooting victim and his family and for this small island and the trouble they were having.
Highly recommend this book, give it a little time, it all comes together, though not in a neat little tie it in a bow package.
Thank you to William Morrow for my finished copy

Published by William Morrow on September 21, 2021

Racism and loss are dominant background themes in When Ghosts Come Home, a crime novel set in North Carolina in 1984. Winston Barnes is the Sheriff, but he’s likely to lose his reelection campaign to a good old boy named Bradley Frye who terrorizes black neighborhoods by shooting his gun while nightriding with a confederate flag on his pickup. Winston’s wife is battling cancer. His daughter Colleen just arrived home for an unexpected visit. Colleen made an impulsive decision to take a break from her husband in Texas after she experienced a stillbirth. Exactly why she thought it necessary to take that trip without talking it over with her husband first was never quite clear to me.

The plot begins when Winston is awakened by the sound of a low flying plane. Fearing that the plane might have crashed, he drives to the small local airport. Fearful because he is going out at night alone, Winston's wife calls one of his deputies and asks him to back up Winston.

At the airport, Winston finds a plane with broken landing gear that just avoided a collision at the end of the runway. The plane is empty, but he sees the body of Rodney Bellamy laying on the ground. Rodney has been shot. Winston finds Rodney's car is in the airport parking lot. Rodney’s wife, Janelle, tells Winston that he went to a 24-hour supermarket to buy diapers for their baby and didn’t return. Janelle has a much younger brother named Jay who got into trouble in Atlanta and has been exiled to Janelle’s home until he gets his act together.

None of the characters are entirely likable, although Jay is the most sympathetic. He was hanging with the wrong peers in Atlanta and was sent to North Carolina to get his life straight. Even before Rodney’s murder, Jay’s new life is troubled. His only friend is a white kid whose father doesn’t approve of blacks. Jay soon has a confrontation with Frye that makes him wish he hadn’t been pushed out of Atlanta.

Colleen’s grief and her feeling that her stillborn son’s ghost followed her from Texas is meant to give the story an emotional charge. Colleen’s decision to leave her husband in order to heal, her weeping every time she sees a baby, and her need to make a decision about her future seem artificial. The heart-tugging plot elements add little interest to the story.

Winston’s shooting of a black suspect in the early days of his law enforcement career has the similar feel of an event that Wiley Cash contrived to give Winston a burden that explains his troubled personality. Winston complains that his wife undermined his job or his masculinity by asking the deputy to provide backup at the airport. Winston’s failure to appreciate his dying wife’s concern makes him a bit of a jerk, although I suppose his mildly toxic masculinity is realistic. Still, I found it hard to care about Winston or his daughter.

The whodunit and the subplot involving Jay are sufficient to hold the reader's attention in the absence of compelling characters. Jay plays a collateral role in the larger mystery and creates a moral dilemma for Winston, who must decide whether to overlook the law in the interest of justice. A similar moral dilemma makes Winston weigh the arrest of a likely killer against the evil that the killing probably prevented.

As much as I believe in the power of fiction to expose the ugliness of racism, for a time I thought that the issue was overplayed, that the nightriding of the racist characters was almost cartoonish. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that some of the racists have underlying motivations for their obnoxious conduct that transcend race.

The surprise ending is partially telegraphed — there are clues that don’t make any sense unless they were planted to set up the ending — but in a key respect the ending comes as a shock. The ending is abrupt and not entirely satisfying, in part because it is never clear how the culprit managed to become part of the criminal enterprise that resulted in Rodney’s death. Still, I give Cash credit for the jarring, unconventional ending and for telling a story that is entertaining if not entirely credible.

RECOMMENDED

Winston Barnes is up for re-election for sheriff next week against a good old boy competitor. His wife Marie has cancer, and his cherished daughter Colleen has lost her own child, leaving her husband to mourn in her hometown. Amidst all this, a plane crashes in the small-town airport nearby, with a murdered classmate of Colleen's at the scene, leaving Winston puzzled by the connection - or is there one? Cash's writing style is still evident, and plot and pace is a return to his literary thriller roots after the slower and quieter The Last Ballad - a quick read, though could have used a little more depth to some of the characters, and the ending a little less rushed. Overall, 3.5 stars rounded up.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I really really liked this book a lot until the very last pages. I hate it when a good book has a rushed ending. I understand if the author didn't want to write a.bunch more to tell the whole ending but devoting just one more chapter would have been better than the single page. What was a very beautiful moving and engaging story was in my opinion completely ruined by the abrupt one paragraph wrap up. Why couldn't we just have one more chapter. When does Winston know what is happening to him? How did Groom hook up with Frye, what happens when Colleen calls Scott. It didn't need to be a lot it just needed to be more.

A hard working man, trying to do the right thing.. finds himself the lead investigator on a peculiar case, in a small North Carolina town. Sheriff Winston Barnes, is the first in the scene for a plane crash.. that has been abandoned and a also finds a body at the crime scene. Winston is a hard working man who doesn’t t quit but this case has him baffled. While investigating this crime he is taking care of his wife and his daughter, who has recently come home. Wiley Cash, tells a haunting story, with genuine characters.. This town, in 1984, is still battling racial tension. Obvious, in your face racism. Yet the characters still act with the utmost integrity. Sheriff Winston, manages to help his family and break this case wide open. I couldn’t put this one down. I really enjoyed Cash’s story and characters. I kept reading to see how Winston would solve the case and in the end keep the respect of the town.. This was such a well written, excellent read…

This author writes really great characters. I felt like I got to know the primary and secondary characters in a way that made me invested beyond just solving the mystery of the novel.

I do feel the ending was a a disappointment, while it left me gasping, it also felt cliche and not a fit to how the story felt it should flow.

I will read more by this author.

In his newest book, Wiley Cash offers a mystery and police procedural set in a small Southern town. When Ghosts Come Home centers around racial tensions, political angles, and the testing of longstanding allegiances in mid-1980s Eastern North Carolina.

Sheriff Winston Barnes knows he probably won't be reelected. He does things by the book and isn't flashy, while his aggressive opponent seems to amass more wealth and (dubious sources of) support each passing day. Meanwhile, Winston's wife is in cancer treatment and his daughter has just experienced a devastating loss and is drifting, unmoored. He's got a lot on his plate.

But when a body and an abandoned airplane are found in his quiet, coastal North Carolina town, Winston must try to unravel the mystery of the events at hand.

Rumors, long-simmering conflicts, clashing loyalties, and Barnes's personal tragedy all complicate the discovery of the truth. I was all in for the shocking events that occurred late in the book.

The very end of the story brought to light a sudden burst of twisty complications and cemented the course of events, but these goings-on occurred off the page and were summarized for the reader. I found that deeply unsatisfying. But I really like Cash's character-driven mystery writing, and I'm definitely in for reading his future books.

I received a prepublication digital edition of this book courtesy of NetGalley and William Morrow.

When everyone involved in a murder investigation is a suspect — including the dead man — it’s more than likely you’ve wandered into one of Wiley Cash’s tautly plotted novels.

“When Ghosts Come Home” is that book. Set on the coast of North Carolina — Cash fans have no fear; the novel hearkens more than once to the author’s beloved mountains — the story is quintessential Cash. A small town setting, developer land grabs, drugs and bitter racism permeate a story that ably juggles the ghosts of three distinct and interconnected characters: an aging sheriff about to be bested by a young and corrupt political challenger, a 14-year-old Black boy who is essentially cast from his family for minor infractions and a young woman whose stillbirth pregnancy drives her home.

Cash not only has the talent to turn such seeming disparity into a cogent read, he manages to turn a literary novel into an engrossing thriller. The author recently agreed to take a few questions from Mountain Times about his new novel. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Tom Mayer: Wiley, your three previous novels have largely centered on the mountains. In “When Ghosts Come Home” we move to the coast of North Carolina. The mountains have always permeated your works, why the migration?

Wiley Cash: My wife is from Wilmington; she was raised there. We had been living in West Virginia and we moved back to North Carolina in 2013, and moved down to Wilmington. It took me quite a while to figure out how to frame a story set on the coast of North Carolina.

It takes me a long time for me to feel like I know a place. For example, I never published anything about West Virginia or Louisiana fiction-wise in 10 years — which is a quarter of my life in those places. I’ve never really written about them. But since my wife is from Wilmington, and we have two little girls, both born in Wilmington, I thought if I’m ever going to know about this place it’s time I wrote about it. It just made sense for a fourth novel to tackle the history, the place, the geography, the culture and cultural memories of Eastern North Carolina.

TM: “When Ghosts Come Home” has several large themes working in it, with the largest being something the sense of home — of belonging. Being rooted to place, home and family influences much of your work, but in this novel I sense two distinct ideas. 1. Home as a place to be protected and defended. 2. Home as a place to back to when the world crashes around you. Would you elaborate?

WC: I think you’re exactly right. Colleen comes home to kind of lick her wounds and she feels anxious about that, as many of us do, when we return home in our 20s like many others have done. I know I certainly did; we gauge the world from the vantage point that we know best, and that’s what Colleen does. She comes home and she says, this place makes sense to me. With its memories, its hangups, at least I know what this place is.

Winston is defending home, and so is Ed Bellamy, who is more of a native than Winston is because this is a place — as he would say, whether it is the country that I went to war for in Vietnam or what is a little patch of sand on the eastern part of the state — this is where I’m from and I know what is right and wrong in terms of this place, my community and I’m going to defend both of these.

TM: Themes of racism inform the story in multiple ways. First, the title reminds me of Malcolm X’s 1963 speech after Kennedy’s assassination about “chickens coming home to roost.”

WC: I’m still kind of hung up in the mid 2000s, so I remember that phrase being as one Reverend Jeremiah Wright said about 9/11 which got (President Barack) Obama and all kinds of trouble. I did never attribute that to Malcolm X, but I wasn’t thinking about either one of those actually. I was thinking about these things in our life, these hauntings whether they be personal or cultural or historical that we put off dealing with. We don’t want to deal with our past. We don’t want to deal with our American history honestly and openly. We don’t want to you have honest conversations in our communities. When we don’t face these things, and exorcise them in someway, the ghost of them come back and they visit us and they never go away. That’s what I was thinking about.

TM: Is then the granular view of Oak Island presented in the novel seen as a metaphor for our national polarization?

WC: Sure. I’m trying to do what William Faulkner did, make the local, universal. I’m trying to write about my small corner of the world in ways that have broader themes that people can respond to and identify with and understand no matter where they are. This is a novel about our contemporary moment where we need to have tough conversations that, well you know we call them political, but they’re really cultural, they are historical. We have these signifying moments around vaccines, or a mask, or Black Lives Matter, defund the police. In this novel, people have tough conversations and they’re honest with each other and they’re forced to be honest with each other. I would like for us to get there again.

TM: And thirdly, the idea of home as viewed by different characters: home is one thing to a young, white girl, but the same place is something entirely different to a young, Black teen. Would you discuss the challenges of developing this dichotomy?

WC: The same things that are kind of haunting Colleen, in Colleen’s era — the legacy of school desegregation in the early 1980s and how that is being dealt in the communities — Jay is still dealing with a lot of that stuff in the form of Bradley Frye. These good old boys and these kind of long held racist sympathies they don’t go away, just because we don’t pay attention to them.

TM: Another theme in the novel is something that’s been important in much of your work: the over-development of natural land and resources for profit. By tying the racist attitudes and action of Bradley Frye with his desire to build indiscriminately for gain you exhibit more passion than ever about such motives and deeds.

WC: Yeah, yeah, you know now where we live on the coast, I mean it’s kind of a joke there in New Hanover County that, what good are trees if you can put up track homes? We are seeing this community over-built, and where is it from 20 years ago we never could’ve imagined. What is so interesting is that there are so many of these rural areas — as the sheriff kind of jokes in the novel, a lot of them are inhabited and developed by people from Ohio and New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania and they come in and build gated communities and call them Brunswick or whatever plantation and it’s such an indirect call back to the kind of plantation legacy of slavery that is so obvious that we don’t talk about. That’s happening all around Brunswick and New Hanover counties.

TM: Something we also sometimes don’t discuss are individual traumas. The idea of personal tragedies — Coleen’s loss of a child, Branes’ loss of identity and self-worth, Jay’s essential loss as an orphan — in this novel are tied to notion of family. Can there be a family with out a home, and vice versa, a home without a family?

WC: I don’t know that they are tied together. I travel so much with work and reading and writing that we take the girls with us often times and I’m kind of coming to realize that home is wherever my family is. Whether we’re in a hotel room or a vacation rental, I feel the most connected when I’m with them. And I also think that it’s part kind of being a writer, you’re always assessing the world in which you find yourself. As much as I am anchored to North Carolina and certain parts of North Carolina, I’m not as anchored as anything as I am to my family.

TM: Barnes creates a new home, a new family after an incident in Gastonia forces him to move to Wilmington. Are such moves part of the human condition?

WC: It is , you know we find ourselves leaving places for all sorts of reasons whether they be tragedy or opportunity or a number of things. That’s what Barnes does as he tries to go and create a new home in the best way he can. Yet, in these close knit communities you sometimes find yourself as an outsider, as he does there in Brunswick County. But it also makes him a good person to kind of assess the county in other ways as well.

TM: Thank you for your time today, Wiley. Just one last one, will there be a book tour for this one?

WC: Yeah, people can go to my website, wileycash.com. It’ll be all over North and South Carolina. We’re not doing a lot of flying this time and at each stop we have Covid protocols. We’re going to keep everybody safe. I’m not going to compromise my values or my belief in science to make a buck. So. a lot of the event will be held outside, and a lot of the events will be held in large spaces. I’ll be on the road from Asheville to Wilmington to Spartanburg. … I’ll be all over the place.

I have read and loved this author's last four books, so was very excited to receive this one. This is a murder mystery but SO much more. Both suspenseful AND highly character-driven. Mr. Cash makes you feel as if you know these people and are actually in Oak Island, NC. My whole heart was there for the entire read. The racial commentary is timely, especially as it is still here today, without beating you over the head. I will read anything this man writes! Highly recommend!

Thank you to #NetGalley, Wiley Cash and William Morrow Books for this ARC!

Wiley Cash’s fourth novel, 𝗪𝐇𝐄𝐍 𝐆𝐇𝐎𝐒𝐓𝐒 𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐄 𝐇𝐎𝐌𝐄, published yesterday and is one of the books I’ve most looked forward to this fall. The book marks a bit of a departure for Cash, moving from rich character-driven stories into more of a crime / murder mystery. It takes place in small-town North Carolina in 1984 where sheriff Winston Barnes is woken up in the middle of the night by what sounded like a very low-flying airplane. Upon investigation, he finds an empty abandoned plane and the dead body of a Black man. Complications abound in the sheriff’s life, including a sick wife, an adult daughter returning home, an upcoming election that he’s not likely to win, and some openly racist white folks bent on pinning blame for whatever happened with the plane on the dead man, openly harassing anyone who gets in their way.⁣
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While I enjoyed the book very much, it was much more police procedural than I had expected. The sheriff and his daughter, Colleen, were well-developed characters, but the rest were more one-dimensional and even a bit cliched. Despite that, I enjoyed the investigation and mystery surrounding this story. As it came to a close, I was rewarded, getting part of the ending right, but not all. I like it when an author has a little surprise left waiting for you.

Thanks to William Morrow for an ARC of this book.