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 in Gastonia, N.C. 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.
Brady is the guardian appointed to check in on the girls as they make their way through foster care. He takes his job very seriously because he is, lamentably, all but estranged from his own daughter. Both Brady and Wade have things to atone for, which puts them sometimes on a collision course and sometimes almost on the same side.
While Brady is looking for Wade and the girls, he unexpectedly turns up a story about Wade finding a stash of stolen money. It's a great vignette: while preparing drywall for painting, he tears it down because it isn't perfect and cash comes exploding into the room--literally. He grabs what he can, fills a duffel bag and sets out to get his kids, trying to keep them as safe as possible. Wade is not a bad man at heart; he just makes mistakes that attract the attention of the law and put him in harm's way--as when Pruitt sets off in pursuit of 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 where even McGwire has a role to play. 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
Shelf Talker: Wiley Cash beats the "sophomore curse" in this heartfelt story about family, the effort to right past wrongs and the hope of outrunning the past.