I think I am done with this author. He can write well enough but his stories seem to be more like a small idea that he then tries to craft into a full length book, and the original idea gets mostly lost in the process.
This book takes place in 1984 and a plane lands at a closed airport in the middle of the night. By the time the sheriff gets there the plane is empty and a local man is is found dead on the runway.
Then the book wanders all over the place with nothing relevant to the plane crash, for the next 200+ pages.
Oh because this is the 21st century the author resurrects the poor race relations of 1984, then there is his daughter who lives in Dallas and has a health problem and winds up coming home, and then there is the fact that the sheriff is up for a tough reelection, and then there is his wife who is also I’ll. But what there isn’t is a story with characters that you care about and so you don’t really care what happens to them.
The ending comes out of nowhere and is just one more poorly thought out piece of this very weak story. ( )

3.5 ⭐️

Set in 1984 Oak Island, North Carolina, When Ghosts Come Home by Wiley Cash revolves around honest and hardworking Sheriff Winston Barnes who lives with his wife , Marie, a cancer patient . When the noise from a low flying plane crash landing at an airfield near his home wakes him up in the middle of the night , he goes to investigate only to discover the plane abandoned and the dead body of Rodney Bellamy an African American young man who went to school with his daughter and who was the son of a teacher and civil rights activist. When some citizens of the community deliberately malign Rodney’s reputation by suggesting that his murder was a result of him being involved in drug related criminal activities his family becomes the target of threats and racially motivated suspicion and hate.

Up for reelection and pitted against a younger but shady opponent , Winston understands how crucial it is to solve the crime that has shocked his small town and inflamed racial tensions. However, his efforts are largely hampered by limited manpower and resources, FBI involvement, racially motivated groups within his own workplace and in his town as well as family issues. His only daughter Colleen , still dealing with trauma from stillborn childbirth , returns home from her husband in Dallas . While Winston deals with his wife's illness and daughter's grief he sees an escalation of racially motivated violence and a general feeling of mistrust in his immediate environment. In Winston Barnes the author creates admirable protagonist who never compromises on his integrity and sense of justice even in the face of utmost danger .

When Ghosts Come Home is an sensitive picture of family, community , crime and racial relations in a small town . This was my first Wiley Cash novel and while I liked the story and the combination of family drama and suspense with a diverse cast of characters, the pacing was a little too slow for my liking. The dialogue and emotional aspects of grief and family were beautifully portrayed but somehow the mystery angle fell short. The beginning of the story was engaging but the ending felt a little abrupt and hurried. I felt a little let down with not the ending per se but the way the ending of the story was framed . ( )

This novel is a bit different from Wiley Cash's usual fare. It's almost a historical novel, being set in the early 1980s, and Cash's ability to vividly describe a specific place (Oak Island, North Carolina) at a specific time is unchanged, but here he's primarily engaged in writing a thriller. Taking place over just a few days, this novel starts slowly before throwing all the twists and turns in at the end.

A sheriff is jolted away by the sound of a crash at the local airfield. Arriving at the scene, he finds an abandoned plane at the end of the runway and a dead body at the other end. As he tries to find out what the plane had been carrying and what happened, he's also in a heated election battle to retain his seat, an election he expects to lose and his opponent is acting like he's already won. The dead body is the son of a local high school teacher and civil rights activist, giving the racists an excuse to menace the Black community. And his daughter, still mourning a lost pregnancy, shows up, unsure of what her future holds.

This was a character-driven novel, with a protagonist not unlike a Walt Longmire, and Cash's love of setting a scene works against the genre here. But I enjoyed this look at a Carolina ocean community in the off-season and how very nice people can hold some very ugly ideas. There's a final twist at the end that I absolutely did not see coming. While I prefer Cash's more thoughtful and quiet novels, this was a lot of fun. ( )

Cash does a good job getting inside the main characters here, but loses points bigtime for a clunky “twist”, which is obvious almost from the first moment the key character is introduced.

The basic plot is pretty simple: Winston Barnes, sheriff of a North Carolina beach county dependent mostly on tourism, is up for re-election and facing off against a local good ol’ boy. Winston needs to keep the job, both out of professional pride and for financial reasons. When a large and unidentified cargo plane is damaged during an unexpected predawn landing at the small local airport, he goes to investigate, finding an empty plane and the body of a local Black man, setting off immediate rumors of drug-running and organized criminal activity within the Black community. Into this already tense situation, Winston’s adult daughter Colleen comes home, trying to outrun the grief of a lost child and a crumbling marriage. From that point on, most of the narrative is pretty evenly split between the two as Winston attempts to keep a lid on simmering racial violence, deal with a traumatic incident in his own past, and get the mystery solved in a way that will let him keep his job. Colleen remains more internally focused as she tries to heal her emotional wounds, lay the ghost of the child who never drew breath, and decide what her path forward will be.

Cash also spends a fair amount of time inside the heads of the dead man’s family – his father, who is the principal of the local high school, his young widow, and her troubled younger brother, and in doing so opens up an important question when all is said and done … but then leaves the reader to make a decision as to what really happened out there in the dark on that final, violent night. It’s so well done, and so skillfully set up, that it makes one strain to believe Cash couldn’t have come up with a more subtle and believable way to base his later “twist” on a more believable scenario. ( )

This southern mystery takes place near a small coastal town in North Carolina. The sheriff finds an abandoned plane and a dead body and must solve the case. At the same time, the sheriff's daughter returns home to face some demons of her own. The book touches on racial tensions, small town politics and the meaning of home. The ending though! I need to talk to Mr. Cash about that!! ( )