Hailed as "mesmerizing" (New York Times Book Review) and "as if Cormac McCarthy decided to rewrite Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird" (Richmond Times-Dispatch), A Land More Kind Than Home made Wiley Cash an instant literary sensation. His resonant new novel, This Dark Road to Mercy, is a tale of love and atonement, blood and vengeance, a story that involves two young sisters, a wayward father, and an enemy determined to see him pay for his sins.
When their mother dies unexpectedly, twelve-year-old Easter Quillby and her six-year-old sister, Ruby, are shuffled into the foster care system in Gastonia, North Carolina, a little town not far from the Appalachian Mountains. But just as they settle into their new life, their errant father, Wade, an ex-minor league baseball player whom they haven't seen in years, suddenly reappears and steals them away in the middle of the night.
Brady Weller, the girls' court-appointed guardian, begins looking for Wade, and quickly turns up unsettling information linking him to a multimillion-dollar robbery. But Brady isn't the only one hunting him. Also on the trail is Robert Pruitt, a mercurial man nursing a years-old vendetta, a man determined to find Wade and claim what he believes he is owed.
The combination of Cash's evocative and intimate Southern voice and those of the alternating narrators, Easter, Brady, and Pruitt, brings this soulful story vividly to life. At once captivating and heartbreaking, This Dark Road to Mercy is a testament to the unbreakable bonds of family and the primal desire to outrun a past that refuses to let go.
Jackie says:
"I've loved this book since last year when Wiley Cash was part of the 2013 Writers Respond To Readers here at Tattered Cover. He read a nice big piece of what was a work in progress at that time, and I just knew that this book was going to be BIG. This is the story of two little girls who lost their mother to an overdose and are now in the foster care system. They have a father, Wade, but he gave up his rights as a parent years before. But things have changed for Wade after he discovered a wall full of cash while finishing drywalling a basement of a very, very, very nasty man. Wade filled a duffel bag to the seams with that money and headed for his kids. He tried to get them legitimately, but the system said no. So he just climbed in their window one night and off they went on an adventure which changes into fleeing the very personally motivated hitman who is on Wade's tail. I pretty much read this book in one day, finding myself unable to put close the book when they were still on the run. It's tense, but often funny as well. The bad guys are bad (there is an element of violence to this book) and everyone else is doing the best they can while not always making the best choices. Just read the book. You won't be sorry."
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