When Ghosts Come Home by Wiley Cash

Published by William Morrow on September 21, 2021

Racism and loss are dominant background themes in When Ghosts Come Home, a crime novel set in North Carolina in 1984. Winston Barnes is the Sheriff, but he’s likely to lose his reelection campaign to a good old boy named Bradley Frye who terrorizes black neighborhoods by shooting his gun while nightriding with a confederate flag on his pickup. Winston’s wife is battling cancer. His daughter Colleen just arrived home for an unexpected visit. Colleen made an impulsive decision to take a break from her husband in Texas after she experienced a stillbirth. Exactly why she thought it necessary to take that trip without talking it over with her husband first was never quite clear to me.

The plot begins when Winston is awakened by the sound of a low flying plane. Fearing that the plane might have crashed, he drives to the small local airport. Fearful because he is going out at night alone, Winston's wife calls one of his deputies and asks him to back up Winston.

At the airport, Winston finds a plane with broken landing gear that just avoided a collision at the end of the runway. The plane is empty, but he sees the body of Rodney Bellamy laying on the ground. Rodney has been shot. Winston finds Rodney's car is in the airport parking lot. Rodney’s wife, Janelle, tells Winston that he went to a 24-hour supermarket to buy diapers for their baby and didn’t return. Janelle has a much younger brother named Jay who got into trouble in Atlanta and has been exiled to Janelle’s home until he gets his act together.

None of the characters are entirely likable, although Jay is the most sympathetic. He was hanging with the wrong peers in Atlanta and was sent to North Carolina to get his life straight. Even before Rodney’s murder, Jay’s new life is troubled. His only friend is a white kid whose father doesn’t approve of blacks. Jay soon has a confrontation with Frye that makes him wish he hadn’t been pushed out of Atlanta.

Colleen’s grief and her feeling that her stillborn son’s ghost followed her from Texas is meant to give the story an emotional charge. Colleen’s decision to leave her husband in order to heal, her weeping every time she sees a baby, and her need to make a decision about her future seem artificial. The heart-tugging plot elements add little interest to the story.

Winston’s shooting of a black suspect in the early days of his law enforcement career has the similar feel of an event that Wiley Cash contrived to give Winston a burden that explains his troubled personality. Winston complains that his wife undermined his job or his masculinity by asking the deputy to provide backup at the airport. Winston’s failure to appreciate his dying wife’s concern makes him a bit of a jerk, although I suppose his mildly toxic masculinity is realistic. Still, I found it hard to care about Winston or his daughter.

The whodunit and the subplot involving Jay are sufficient to hold the reader's attention in the absence of compelling characters. Jay plays a collateral role in the larger mystery and creates a moral dilemma for Winston, who must decide whether to overlook the law in the interest of justice. A similar moral dilemma makes Winston weigh the arrest of a likely killer against the evil that the killing probably prevented.

As much as I believe in the power of fiction to expose the ugliness of racism, for a time I thought that the issue was overplayed, that the nightriding of the racist characters was almost cartoonish. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that some of the racists have underlying motivations for their obnoxious conduct that transcend race.

The surprise ending is partially telegraphed — there are clues that don’t make any sense unless they were planted to set up the ending — but in a key respect the ending comes as a shock. The ending is abrupt and not entirely satisfying, in part because it is never clear how the culprit managed to become part of the criminal enterprise that resulted in Rodney’s death. Still, I give Cash credit for the jarring, unconventional ending and for telling a story that is entertaining if not entirely credible.

RECOMMENDED