Review: This Dark Road to Mercy by Wiley Cash

• Format: Kindle Edition
• Print Length: 240 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (Jan. 28 2014)
• Sold by: HarperCollins Publishers CA
• Language: English
• ASIN: B00DB2YN9I

Book Description

The critically acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller A Land More Kind Than Home—hailed as "a powerfully moving debut that reads as if Cormac McCarthy decided to rewrite Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird" (Richmond Times Dispatch)—returns with a resonant novel of love and atonement, blood and vengeance, set in western North Carolina, involving two young sisters, a wayward father, and an enemy determined to see him pay for his sins.

After their mother's unexpected death, twelve-year-old Easter and her six-year-old sister Ruby are adjusting to life in foster care when their errant father, Wade, suddenly appears. Since Wade signed away his legal rights, the only way he can get his daughters back is to steal them away in the night.

Brady Weller, the girls' court-appointed guardian, begins looking for Wade, and he quickly turns up unsettling information linking Wade to a recent armored car heist, one with a whopping $14.5 million missing. But Brady Weller isn't the only one hunting the desperate father. Robert Pruitt, a shady and mercurial man nursing a years-old vendetta, is also determined to find Wade and claim his due.

Narrated by a trio of alternating voices, This Dark Road to Mercy is a story about the indelible power of family and the primal desire to outrun a past that refuses to let go.


About the Author

Wiley Cash is from western North Carolina and has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He has held residency positions at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University. He and his wife live in West Virginia. This is his second novel.


My Review

I love Southern gothic novels, and Wiley Cash`s second novel This Dark Road to Mercy is an excellent one.  Well written story that makes you think.

I was recently in North Carolina. As soon as he mentioned Bojangles I remembered why I like to travel so much...so I can really understand the places I read about. When Easter was remembering how they could order a few things the one time they were there with their mother, I was overwhelmed. What to me was economical delicious meal - the biscuits are to die for - to someone else it was a feast..one that they could ill afford. The gulf between the rich and poor keeps getting wider in the US.

When they woke up on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the fog with the leaves red and yellow on the trees I could feel the moisture of the fog and smell the leaves.

Baseball. Every aspect of the book is tinged with its influence. It`s all good.

Fabulous story. Hard to put down. I raced to the ending...which was worth it. This Dark Road to Mercy is available in January. It is definitely a winner and deserves a read.