Sheriff Winston Barnes and his wife, Marie, both hear it: an airplane, coming in low, at 3:18 a.m. In When Ghosts Come Home, the tense fourth novel by Wiley Cash (A Land More Kind Than Home; The Last Ballad), the sheriff dutifully drives to the town's airport to investigate, setting in motion events that rock tiny Oak Island in 1984, and irreversibly impact the Barnes family.
After nearly 12 years as sheriff, Barnes has a challenger in the upcoming election. It's Bradley Frey, a "good ol' boy with a rich daddy who could afford to play nationalist." Marie is struggling with cancer, and their daughter has just lost her first baby. When Barnes finds an abandoned World War II plane, the body of a shooting victim and no clues, he knows the mystery will have a ripple effect in the isolated community off the North Carolina coast, and will burden his already fraught days. Complicating matters, the victim was one of the few Black men in town, a new father and the son of a respected teacher. No evidence connects him to the plane, but Frey and his cronies, "rebel flags flying," spread racist rumors that he's been dealing drugs. Tension grows as Barnes faces staff resistance and intrusion from FBI agents. Pursuing the case, he faces uncomfortable facts about Oak Island, "suddenly and acutely aware that he had run out of allies and that he was alone, both the arbiter of justice and the witness to justice gone awry."
The mystery of the plane and the murder is compelling, but it's the sense of foreboding surrounding Sheriff Barnes that drives When Ghosts Come Home to its shocking conclusion. --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.