In the middle of the night, Sheriff Winston Barnes learns that a plane has crashed at a coastal airfield, with neither pilot nor cargo in evidence but a local man found shot dead. As Winston investigates, a devious challenger threatens his reelection as sheriff, his daughter returns home with heartbreak of her own, and long-submerged racial bitterness comes to the fore. Cash is a CWA Gold Dagger and two-time Southern Book Prize winner, plus an Edgar and PEN Bingham finalist, which nicely sums up the literary/thriller sensibility evidenced here. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Cash (The Last Ballad; A Land More Kind Than Home) dips into crime fiction with this novel set in 1984 coastal Oak Island, NC, where racial tensions are high, and developers are snapping up land to build houses for wealthy Northern "second homers" and transplants. Sheriff Winston Barnes is facing a tough reelection battle against odious local bad boy Bradley Frye and dealing with his wife Marie's cancer diagnosis. When a plane crash-lands in the middle of the night at the local airport, Winston arrives on the scene and finds an empty airplane and the body of Rodney Bellamy. He needs to solve the case and find Rodney's murderer before the election as well as comfort his daughter Colleen, who has returned to her parents' house after losing a baby. He also must contend with racists who terrorize Rodney's young widow Janelle and imply that Rodney was involved in drug dealing. VERDICT Cash excels at conveying realistic family and community dynamics and creating complex characters, at least with the Barneses. Other characters, especially the cartoon-like villain, are not as deftly written. Mystery readers might quibble with a sizable plot hole and a rushed but shocking ending, but Cash's fans and readers of Southern stories will enjoy.—Liz French, Library Journal

The trouble for Sheriff Winston Barnes, the upstanding hero of this leisurely whodunit set in 1984 from bestseller Cash (A Land More Kind than Home), begins when he drives late one night to the tiny Oak Island, N.C., airport, where an airplane has crash landed. On the runway near the plane, which is empty, lies the body of Rodney Bellamy, who's been shot to death. Rodney went to school with Winston's estranged daughter, Colleen, and was the son of one of the county's leading civil rights advocates. An FBI investigation into the mysterious plane, which may have been carrying cocaine, threatens Winston's image as a capable cop—and his chances in a tough re-election against rich boy Bradley Frye. Racial tensions escalate as Frye's crew of thugs threaten Rodney's widow and her 14-year-old brother. Meanwhile, Colleen is in town from Texas to figure out her law career and marriage after the death of her baby. A surfeit of background exposition and multiple tangential story lines slow the momentum of the murder plot. This rich character-driven tale works best as a social portrait of a community and an era. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Assoc. (Sept.)