“Stumbling My Way to Mystery” by Wiley Cash

Although When Ghosts Come Home is my fourth published novel, in many ways it marks a number of firsts for me. It’s the first novel I began writing after losing my father, and it’s also the first novel I began writing after having two daughters. And although I have always written about the state of North Carolina, this is my first novel set on the coast, where I’ve lived since 2013. Finally, this is the first mystery I’ve written.

Now, I’ve been accused of writing mysteries before, but I’ve always disagreed. My previous novels were mysteries inasmuch as the characters were kept in the dark about what would happen and how. In terms of those novels, the reader always knew the score. They always knew who was evil and who was innocent. But something – please forgive me – mysterious happened while writing When Ghosts Come Home: a mystery revealed itself to me, and I essentially wrote the novel to solve it. 

The book opens as a local sheriff is awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of a large, low-flying airplane on the coast of North Carolina. He climbs out of bed and drives to the small municipal airport to see if an aircraft has made an emergency landing. What he finds changes not only his life, but the life of his small community forever. An empty WWII transport plane has been abandoned and left sitting sideways at the end of the runway. In the grass nearby lies the body of a local man, shot dead and left behind. Who flew this aircraft? Who shot this man?

I didn’t know the answers to those questions until I finished writing the book. Unlike my other novels, this story did not reveal itself until it was finished. There is a first time for everything, and I hope readers are as surprised as I was. 

When Ghosts Come Home by Wiley Cash is published by Faber (£14.99 hardback)

An abandoned plane. A dead body. A small town threatening to explode. 'A searing, thunderous, heartbreaking thriller. Wiley Cash has talent to burn.' Chris Whitaker Winston did not hear it so much as feel it as it passed over their house and into the trees across the waterway. The sheriff struggling for re-election and haunted by his past. The mystery plane which crash-lands on his island. The daughter returning home to hide from her troubles. The FBI pilot sent in to help. As the mystery of the abandoned plane and the dead body stokes long-simmering racial tensions, a moment of reckoning draws ever closer for the town of Oak Island.