"Wiley Cash has written a suspenseful, yet heart-tugging novel about community, duty, loss, racial divides, family and love. When Ghosts Come Home is a compassionate and timely gem."
"A fascinating, nuanced meditation on life - both the living of it and the taking of it - in the crucible of small town America. Wiley Cash is our guide through this maze of old secrets and fresh hurts. Take his hand, follow his lead and face the truth."
An intelligent mystery that features realistic and layered characters from a storyteller who becomes more masterful with every novel.
[When Ghosts Come Home ] is great work, a novel that will not disappoint… Readers will care, and care deeply, about the sheriff, his wife, and his daughter, each of whom is dealing with pain and regret.
Don’t miss When Ghosts Come Home … [It’s a] page-turner…. [and] the whodunit is mighty compelling.
"Taut, tense, and tender—this novel hits every note. I loved it and devoured it with fury, straight to its blazing end.
Wiley Cash delivers a spellbinding novel that is part family drama, part police procedural, and part race-reckoning in a small Southern town.
In When Ghosts Come Home Wiley Cash reveals how family and history and the threads that connect us can contain such mystery. This is a masterful example of storytelling, told by one of the most open-hearted and clear-eyed writers I know."
Cash may be North Carolina’s most promising and popular young fiction writer….His story is a compelling one, well worth waiting for its September release.
Wilkes Journal-Patriot (N. Wilkesboro
A must read, the lasting effects of When Ghosts Come Home refuse to let go, and will remain with me for quite some time.”
A searing emotional story . . . . [Cash’s] four novels have proven him to be an author to watch. When Ghosts Come Home continues his high standards.”
When Ghosts Come Home is a gripping mystery as complex and layered as the characters who inhabit it. Set in 1984, Wiley Cash’s exploration of race, justice, and grief – of the fault lines that rip apart families and communities – could not be more timely.
A brilliant portrait of how we arrived at the present, exploring race, class, greed, and how close we’ve always been to both the dangers that never hid themselves and the dangers we didn’t see coming. This breathtaking story offers insight, heartbreak, and grace in equal measure.
"Wiley Cash's latest is an unputdownable knock-out: written in deft, thrilling prose, this book is both a gripping murder mystery and a thoughtful exploration of systemic racism in America. The perfect novel for our present moment."
Cash writes a taut narrative, and he's adept at dealing with the darker side of human nature… "When Ghosts Come Home" grapples with significant moral issues…[and] is compulsively readable.
Writing with clarity and grace, best-selling Cash is a gem of a storyteller, combining the solitary journey of a young mother’s grief and a community’s relentless battle against racial injustice. The result is a tightly crafted whodunit with true depth that readers will simultaneously want to speed through and savor.
Booklist (starred review)
When Ghosts Come Home haunts the heart and stresses the soul.
Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star
Style is not the only reason [Cash’s] latest novel is so consuming. This is a timely novel that, while certainly dark, also asks us to believe in hope — in redemption… Cash delivers the kind of book so many of us crave."
Cash is a good storyteller, capturing the cadence of Southern speech and the complexity of modest lives with thoughtful intelligence.
New York Times Book Review
"A treatise on race in America wrapped in a family drama wrapped in a mystery, it brings us a thoughtful examination of a good man's struggle to do right under trying circumstances. Cash puts his whole heart on the page with these flawed, true characters, and the reward is ours."
A searing, thunderous, heartbreaking thriller. Wiley Cash has talent to burn.
[A] gripping, multi-layered [novel]… Some readers may be taken aback by the abrupt gut-punch ending... But as I mulled it over for several days — and that says a lot about the power of the book — I understood it was not capricious… It was as inevitable as nightfall in late autumn.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Darkly mesmerizing.
So beautifully written that you’ll be torn about how fast to read it. This is great, gothic Southern fiction.
Exciting and suspenseful as well as moving, with a captivating heroine, this is a tremendous book.
Darkly mesmerizing.”
%COMM_CONTRIB%O Magazine
I try to state the truth and dislike flinging superlatives about with mad abandon, but I have been so deeply impressed by this novel that only superlatives can convey the tenor of my thought: this is one of the most powerful novels I have ever read.
Wiley Cash makes his debut with this fine, engaging novel, proving yet again that the South is an inexhaustible motherlode of literature. I’m sure he’ll garner comparisons to Harper Lee, perhaps even to Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor, but Wiley Cash is Wiley Cash—a new, strong Southern voice in American fiction.
This book will knock your socks off. It’s so good to read a first novel that sings with talent. Wiley Cash has a beautifully written hit on his hands.
Cinematic and symphonic: this is a compelling story revealed in a sequence of voices that are as pitch-perfect as they are irresistible. This is a wonderfully impressive debut: tender, muscled and unforgettable.
Absorbing . . . Cash uses well-placed flashbacks to flesh out his characters . . . and to illuminate a familiar truth of Southern lit: Many are the ways that fathers fail their sons.
A riveting story! The writing is bold, daring, graceful, and engrossing.
Cash adeptly captures the rhythms of Appalachian speech, narrating his atmospheric novel in the voices of three characters . . . The story has elements of a thriller, but Cash is ultimately interested in how unscrupulous individuals can bend decent people to their own dark ends.
Whew! Wiley Cash is the real deal and his first novel is an atmospheric crossroads filled with characters who long for better, but know that their best will never be good enough, is dense with stories intersecting like the branches in a laurel hell.
Cash adeptly captures the rhythms of Appalachian speech, narrating his atmospheric novel in the voices of three characters . . . The story has elements of a thriller, but Cash is ultimately interested in how unscrupulous individuals can bend decent people to their own dark ends.
Wiley Cash’s novel embeds a tender coming-of-age story within a suspense-filled thriller. . . . [A] clear-sighted, graceful debut.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
08/13/2021
Cash (The Last Ballad ; A Land More Kind Than Home ) dips into crime fiction with this novel set in 1984 coastal Oak Island, NC, where racial tensions are high, and developers are snapping up land to build houses for wealthy Northern "second homers" and transplants. Sheriff Winston Barnes is facing a tough reelection battle against odious local bad boy Bradley Frye and dealing with his wife Marie's cancer diagnosis. When a plane crash-lands in the middle of the night at the local airport, Winston arrives on the scene and finds an empty airplane and the body of Rodney Bellamy. He needs to solve the case and find Rodney's murderer before the election as well as comfort his daughter Colleen, who has returned to her parents' house after losing a baby. He also must contend with racists who terrorize Rodney's young widow Janelle and imply that Rodney was involved in drug dealing. VERDICT Cash excels at conveying realistic family and community dynamics and creating complex characters, at least with the Barneses. Other characters, especially the cartoon-like villain, are not as deftly written. Mystery readers might quibble with a sizable plot hole and a rushed but shocking ending, but Cash's fans and readers of Southern stories will enjoy.—Liz French, Library Journal
2021-07-14
When Sheriff Winston Barnes is awoken by a loud noise in the middle of the night, he gets out of bed to investigate at the local airport. But what he finds there surprises him—an empty plane and a dead body. Now Winston, in the middle of an election against an entitled younger man named Bradley Frye who wants power more than he wants to be sheriff, has to figure out what was on that plane and who shot the man. As Barnes investigates the case, he’s drawn deeper into the anger and resentment that bubble just below the surface in his small North Carolina beach town. The man who was shot, Rodney Bellamy, is Black, and now the White Bradley Frye and his friends are terrorizing Bellamy’s family—driving through their neighborhood with Confederate flags, breaking their windows, and threatening them. In addition to the racism in his town, Sheriff Barnes is also dealing with his daughter, Colleen, who’s back home and grieving after losing her child. Cash skillfully balances three points of view—those of Barnes, Colleen, and Jay, Rodney Bellamy’s 14-year-old brother-in-law, who bears the brunt of Bradley Frye’s racist attacks. Through the eyes of these very different characters, Cash creates an exquisitely detailed world that feels real and lived in. Sheriff Barnes is an easy character to root for as a man trying to do his best while living in a town that’s fighting against him. Although the plot alone is compelling enough to keep readers turning the pages, this is also a quietly moving look at how realistically flawed characters deal with the tragedies life throws at them.
A gripping mystery with characters that will linger in readers’ minds long after they turn the last page.
