In his debut novel, A Land More Kind than Home, Wiley Cash, a native of North Carolina, wrote about the South as only one who knows it can. This Dark Road to Mercy revisits the same geography and puts Cash's storytelling genius to work with different people, equally snake-bit (this time metaphorically).
As in A Land More Kind than Home, the narrative in This Dark Road to Mercy is told in three alternating voices: 12-year-old Easter; her court-appointed guardian, Brady; and Pruitt, a man carrying a vendetta that has festered for years.
When their mother dies of an overdose, Easter and her six-year-old sister, Ruby, are consigned to the foster care system. Just as they are settling in, Wade--who previously had waived his legal rights as their father--comes in the night and spirits them away.
While Brady is looking for Wade and the girls, he unexpectedly turns up a story about Wade finding a stash of stolen money. Pruitt is also pursuing Wade, seeking revenge for past wrongs, as well as a big payday from the "owner" of that stolen cash.
Baseball is a subtext in the novel: Wade and Pruitt are ex-minor leaguers, and the story takes place in the summer of 1998, when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire battled to break Roger Maris's home run record. Cash pulls all the threads together as his characters converge on Busch Stadium in St. Louis for an exciting climax. The story doesn't end there, though, and Cash leaves the reader hopeful that present good intention might override past errors in judgment. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.