When Ghosts Come Home: A Novel

I received an ARC of this novel from Goodreads Giveaway, Wiley Cash, and William Morrow publishers. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read When Ghosts Come Home of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. I am always pleased to read Wiley Cash - He is always a winner - and this was right up there with the best of the best. I am pleased to recommend this historical novel to friends and family. It is October 30, 1984, and Sheriff Winston Barnes is responsible for policing the small coastal community of Oak Island in North Carolina, a job he cherishes and has held for the last 12 years, but might lose in the coming week's election. His opposition in the election is the racist son of a local realtor, a young man with too much money and not enough smarts to protect this community. But Brad Frye can afford billboards and TV ads and the spreading of untrue rumors about Winston. Some folks can't see past the pretty ads. Winston has a small but good staff for the most part, and a very busy home life - his wife Marie is facing a second bout with cancer, and his only child, Colleen, with her lawyer husband Scott are now residing in Dallas Texas, and recently their first baby was stillborn. The crash landing of a very large airplane at their very small airport in the middle of the night begins a sequence of events that shatters the timeline of life for the Barnes family. By the time Winston gets to the airport, the plane, cocked around crossways on the runway, is empty and there are no fingerprints anywhere on the plane. The is a dead man nearby, a local black man who went to school with Colleen. Rodney Bellamy was a good man with a young wife, well employed, a new father, and the son of Colleen's favorite teacher at the local high school. Immediately everyone is whispering drugs. Brad is shouting it, and blaming it on the black community as a whole and Winston's lax hand on the community during his tenure as sheriff. Winston is certain that Rodney was not involved in drugs, and when his wife reported him missing in the wee hours of the morning, she said they had been walking the floor with the baby most of the night, and Rodney had headed to the store for diapers. The airport and runway were visible from the parking lot of the grocery store, and Winston assumes Rodney saw the lights - saw the plane land and try to turn from the tree line. Rodney was the kind of man who would run out there to see if he could help. But Bradley Frye is stirring up unrest in the white community, and leading the redneck crowd into storming the black community, setting Oak Island life back 40 years. Knowing nothing of this, Colleen chooses this time to come home from Dallas for a little TLC from her family. Tender loving care they have in abundance - and she is needed at home, Marie is frail and Winston is overworked. Seeing the seething racial unrest developing in the community breaks his heart. The problems of class strife, racial violence, grief, and loss of faith eat at his soul. This book had me in tears several times and was an all-nighter. I simply couldn't put it down. These unforgettable characters are now 'friends'. This is a story that will bring you down and lift you again, higher than high.

boring book