Fiction Review: When Ghosts Come Home

For a while now, I've been hearing good things about author Wiley Cash, and I finally had a chance to read one of his novels. For this fall's R.I.P. Challenge, I listened to When Ghosts Come Home, a unique and intriguing mystery with plenty of emotional depth.

In 1984, Sheriff Winston Barnes and his wife, Marie, are woken from sleep by the roar of a low-flying plane in the wee hours of the morning. He gets up to investigate the small nearby airfield that services their community on an island off the coast of North Carolina. What he finds there is shocking: a small, private plane sitting sideways on the runway and a man dead from a gunshot lying nearby. Winston recognizes the victim as Rodney, a local Black man whom Winston knows to be a good, law-abiding man with a new baby at home. It appears the small plane was involved in the drug trade, but what was Rodney doing out there in the middle of the night? The next day, as Winston scrambles to secure the crime scene, his grown daughter, Colleen, shows up unexpectedly from Texas. Colleen and her husband recently lost their baby, and she has come home looking for comfort and escape from her all-encompassing sorrow. Winston goes to visit Rodney's widow, a young woman named Janelle. Janelle has a newborn baby to care for, and her fourteen-year-old brother, Jay, has been staying with them after getting in some minor trouble at home in Atlanta. She says Rodney had gone out to buy diapers, and she doesn't know why he was at the airfield. As Winston tries to untangle the mystery of Rodney's murder, the FBI sends someone to handle the drug side of the crime. All of this is fuel to the fire of racial tensions rising in the town, as a known white supremacist is running against Winston in the upcoming election for sheriff and is also attempting to buy up land owned by Black citizens in order to raze their middle-class homes and build expensive houses near the beach. Winston has to contend with all of these things at once, as he tries to solve the mystery and hold back the growing violence in his community.

While there is a mystery at the heart of this story, it is much more than a straightforward suspense novel. Cash provides in-depth characters, with narration from different perspectives, and plenty of emotional complexity. He explores the racial tensions in the community and how they affect everything that is happening. This thoughtful focus on characters and intricate issues with a mystery at its center reminded me of William Kent Krueger's standalone novels. The audio production, read by J.D. Jackson, was excellent and kept me engrossed, right up to the surprising ending. I enjoyed this thoughtful mystery and would definitely read other novels by Wiley Cash.

320 pages, William Morrow Paperbacks

HarperAudio

This book fits in the following 2023 Reading Challenges:

 

Diversity Reading Challenge

Literary Escapes Challenge - North Carolina

R.I.P. Challenge

 

Disclosure: I received this book from the publisher in return for an honest review. My review is my own opinion and is not influenced by my relationship with the publisher or author.

 

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Listen to a sample of the audiobook here, from the start of the novel, and/or download it from Audible.

 

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