Wiley Cash
When Ghosts Come Home
William Morrow
The Plot: Wiley Cash is known for multilayered plots that start as straightforward stories but soon evolve into thoughtful looks at how the past affects the present, adding in issues of race, class, justice, and greed. In When Ghosts Come Home, Sheriff Winston Barnes’ investigation into a plane crash on the coast of North Carolina and the death of a local Black man morphs into a look at the community and corrupt politics as well as a tender story about the relationship between a father and daughter. As he tries to fight crime, Barnes also battles for his job in a bitter re-election campaign against a crooked, and well-financed opponent who is an unabashed racist. Even some of the man’s own deputies are siding against him. Set in 1984, When Ghosts Come Home shows how far we have come—and how far we haven’t.
The Character: Sheriff Winston Barnes joins Cash’s other strong, complicated characters—good people up against those who often hide their dishonesty and shady side. And like Cash’s other characters, Barnes is flawed, haunted by past mistakes. His love for his family drives him as much as his quest for justice as he tries to help both his wife, who has cancer, and his daughter, who is grief-stricken over her stillborn baby.
This story is from the Fall #169, 2021 edition of Mystery Scene.
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This story is from the Fall #169, 2021 edition of Mystery Scene.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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6 New Writers to Watch
Wiley Cash’s debut, A Land More Kind Than Home, about the bond between two brothers landed on the New York Times Best Sellers List and received the Crime Writers’ Association Debut of the Year.
CARLENE O'CONNOR
“Anyone can play Snow White. It takes real talent to play the Wicked Witch.”
HILARY DAVIDSON
Call it The Case of Life Imitating Art.
S.A. COSBY
In Razorblade Tears, two aging men—one Black, one white, both with criminal pasts—join forces to seek revenge for the murders of their gay sons. The themes of fathers and sons and toxic masculinity will be familar to fans of Cosby’s 2020 breakout Blacktop Wasteland.
THE MANY FACES OF MORIARTY
By 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle was a worldwide literary sensation. But he was also a man dogged by an unlikely enemy, and that enemy’s name was Sherlock Holmes. Frankenstein-like, the fictional detective haunted his creator, tormenting him, and would not leave him alone. For it must be said that Conan Doyle was a man of high literary aspirations, with a yearning to write books of both “serious” literature and psychical research. But the demand for new Holmes stories prevented him from realising this ambition. Speaking of this period in his career, Conan Doyle observed in an interview for Tit-Bits in December 1900 that “My low work was obscuring my higher.”
WILL DEAN
From an isolated cabin in a boggy Swedish forest, Will Dean conjures a fascinating series and now an intense standalone full of claustrophobia and creepiness.
STEPHEN MACK JONES
If the meaning of life is a puzzle awaiting assembly, then writers are purveyors of its pieces.
Madness on Campus
Helen Eustis’ The Horizontal Man
TIME TRAVEL, CATS, AND AN OLD MANUSCRIPT
Have you ever wished that you could go back in time and change something in your past or visit the future and find out what it has in store for you? Have you questioned what would happen if time travel was available to everyone? Could 9/11 have been prevented? Could the spread of COVID-19 have been eradicated before it ended so many lives?
GRIPPING RESEARCH
I said my first words in a bar—“orange sody.” I eventually outgrew my love of Whistle orange soda, but I have a lifelong interest in bars.
