A small-town sheriff is awoken in the middle of the night by the roar of a low-flying airplane and decides to investigate at the nearby airfield. What he finds surprises him — an abandoned plane and the body of a local man left for dead on the side of the runway.
So begins Wiley Cash’s latest novel, “When Ghosts Come Home,” a murder mystery set in 1984. Like Cash’s previous three novels, it takes place in North Carolina, in the small beach town of Oak Island, where Cash spent summers with his parents as a college student.
The idea for the book came from a story Cash had heard about an aircraft that crash landed at the Oak Island airport back in the 1970s.
“The rumor was the aircraft was too large for the runway, and they had to hire somebody to come fly it away,” Cash says, speaking by phone from his home in Wilmington, North Carolina. “My imagination just kind of ran wild with it.”
The novel is told from the points of view of three characters: Sheriff Winston Barnes, who’s locked in a tough reelection battle against a power-hungry younger man and wants to do right by everybody; Barnes’ daughter Colleen, who’s back home and grieving after losing her child; and Jay, the 14-year-old brother-in-law of Rodney Bellamy, the man who was found dead at the airport.
“Many of the characters have pasts that they can’t quite shake, and they try to put things behind them, but our past has a funny way of not being done with us even if we’re done with it,” Cash says.
Hence the title of the novel, “When Ghosts Come Home.”
The year the novel takes place is also significant, according to Cash, who was seven years old during the 1984 presidential election between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale.
“That was the first election where I felt somewhat politically aware, and I wanted to go back and kind of confront myself with the things that I was told as opposed to the things that were true,” he says.
When Ghosts Come Home: Named an Amazon Best Book of 2021
Debut novel: “A Land More Kind Than Home”
It won: The Thomas Wolfe Book Prize
Cash Teaches: fiction writing and literature at the University of N.C.-Asheville
Degree: Ph.D in American Literature from University of Louisiana-Lafayette
Learn more: wileycash.com
