Cash (A Land More Kind Than Home, 2012) follows his evocative debut with another striking take on Southern literature. Wade Chesterfield's a failed baseball player. He claims to have been Sammy Sosa's teammate on the Gastonia Rangers, a North Carolina minor league team. Now, Wade hangs drywall. Brady Weller used to be a Gastonia police detective, until he killed a teenage boy in a traffic accident. Now, Brady sells home security systems, offering silent penance by serving as a court guardian ad litem. That's how Brady meets Easter and Ruby Quillby, wards of the state. They're Wade's children, their mother dead of an overdose. Wade, parental rights signed long ago, now wants to be a true father. Wade's enabled by found money: a backpack of cash linked to an armored car robbery. In the rhythms and cadence of the South, Cash offers a tale about family and about the tenuous link among the right choices, living with consequences or seeking redemption. The story unfolds in three voices: 12-year-old Easter, echoing from nave to wise, hopeful to fearful, believing and doubting; Brady, weary, bitter, intent on finding justice where he can; and finally, Robert Pruitt, former baseball player, now an ex-con driven by 'roid-rage and mindless hatred for Wade, who long ago hit him with a beanball and maimed him. Wade persuades his daughters to flee their foster home. In dread of being sent to Alaska to grandparents she's never met, Easter agrees, since "leaving with him seemed like the best answer." Despite admonitions from his former partner and threats from the FBI, Brady's intent on finding the girls. Then he learns Pruitt's being paid by Tommy Broughton, a small-time hood who engineered the armored car heist, to find Wade and the stolen money, and Brady's pursuit grows more urgent, realizing Pruitt will kill the girls to get to Wade. A story of family, blood loyalty and making choices that can seem right but end up wrong.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Cash's second novel, after his successful debut, A Land More Kind Than Home, does not disappoint. Twelve-year-old Easter and her six-year-old sister Ruby are caught in the foster care system in Gastonia, NC. Having signed away his legal custodial rights, their erstwhile father, Wade, an ex-minor league baseball player, has always said he would take care of them. One night he spirits them away from the one stable home the girls have known. Add to this mix a thug looking for Wade, owing to some missing money. Luckily the girls have someone on their side: Brady Weller, a court-appointed guardian who begins to look for them. -VERDICT Narrated in alternating voices, this book captures the reader's attention from the start and never lets go. Readers who enjoyed Cash's first book or who are fans of well-written Southern fiction will enjoy this novel. [See Prepub Alert, 8/5/13; library marketing.]-Robin Nesbitt, Columbus -Metropolitan Lib., OH (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

WHEN SHE SURFACED in Harry Bingham's "Talking to the Dead," Fiona Griffiths was a rookie on the South Wales police force who had more psychological quirks - including a disconcerting habit of spending quality time in the morgue - than most of the head cases she met in the line of duty. But the intensity she brought to the job made her a most intriguing, if peculiar, detective. Fiona is still communing with corpses (or their body parts) in LOVE STORY, WITH MURDERS (Delacorte, $27), practically going into a swoon when she finds the head of a 22-year-old college student who's been missing for five years. When bits and pieces of a more recent victim, a lecturer at the Cardiff School of Engineering, start turning up in the same sub-urban neighborhood, the entire police force is mobilized. But it's Fiona, with her intuitive understanding of "my all-too-human dead," who uncovers a connection between the two killings that opens up a new field of investigation - into a case of industrial skulduggery. "Because I am who I am, I tend to spend more time thinking about the dead than the living," Fiona says of her unorthodox investigative methods. Hardly an affectation, they're the consequence of a personality disorder called Cotard's syndrome, which numbs the senses even to the point of believing oneself dead. Mental exercises and plenty of homegrown marijuana help Fiona handle these episodes of out-of-body dissociation. But her frozen feelings also cause her to act out, making her more casually violent than your average cop - and altogether unpredictable. Although his volatile protagonist certainly dominates the first-person narrative, Bingham doesn't stint on plot (very complicated), procedures (very detailed) or action (very brutal). There's also a satisfying dimension to secondary characters like Fiona's father, a strip-club owner who was once "Wales's most successful criminal." And while Fiona's clean-cut boyfriend is a bit of a dope, a universally feared superior officer, known as the Ice Queen, is ... well, cool. the woods may be lovely, as Robert Frost would have it, but they're also dreadfully dark in DEEP WINTER (Blue Rider, $25.95), the beautifully written but disturbing first novel Samuel W. Gailey has set in the town of Wyalusing, Pa., where he grew up. The heavily armed and hygienically challenged locals who have a say in this pitiless narrative are, for the most part, a sad and sorry lot, ruled by drink, drugs and stupidity. The kindest among them is Mindy Knolls, a bighearted waitress at the Friedenshutten diner who is beaten to death by a deputy sheriff named Mike Sokowski, her sometime boyfriend and "the meanest bully in Wyalusing." Danny Bedford, a sweet giant of a man with a damaged mind, stumbles upon Mindy's body when he goes to her trailer with a birthday present. By exploiting the pervasive local prejudice against simple but scary Danny, Sokowski frames him for the murder and leads the manhunt that drives him into the woods as a winter storm sweeps in. Nature is savage in this rough country, but nowhere near as savage as the natives. THE VOICE IS Southern and oh so charming in THIS DARK ROAD TO MERCY (Morrow/HarperCollins, $25.99), a crime novel by Wiley Cash that's also a road movie and a baseball tale and a wicked twist on Sixth-Grade Father-Daughter Night. The story begins in Gastonia, N.C., and is divided among three narrators with different views on Wade Chesterfield, a lovable loser who once pitched for the Gastonia Rangers, the same farm team on which Sammy Sosa started out. To his stern 12-year-old daughter, Easter, who hasn't seen her wayward dad in years, Wade is an unwelcome stranger - but still the only person she and her younger sister, Ruby, can call family. To Brady Weller, the girls' court-appointed guardian and himself an unhappily divorced father, Wade is a reckless kidnapper who snatched the girls from foster care. And to the hit man Bobby Pruitt, Wade is the guy he's been hired to kill. After a nerve-racking pursuit, everyone ends up in St. Louis, at a crucial game in the 1998 home run race between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire. If they hadn't left such havoc in their wake, you might also call this a heartwarming love story. SINCE WE CAN'T count on visiting Cairo right now, we might as well binge on Parker Bilal's atmospheric mysteries set in that city and featuring his distinctive private detective, a Sudanese refugee known as Makana. In THE GHOST RUNNER (Bloomsbury, $27), the third book in this excellent series, a prominent lawyer hires Makana to look into the hideous death of a 17-year-old girl, the daughter of Musab Muhamed Khayr, a radical Islamist who may have recently returned from exile. If her death was, as it seems, an honor killing, then her own father might have set the house fire that became her funeral pyre. To get to the truth, Makana travels to Musab's family home in Siwa, an oasis town deep in the desert, full of ugly secrets. The story is set in the unsettled period during the Israeli invasion of the West Bank, which allows Bilal to write in great depth and detail about Egypt's turbulent political landscape. But it's the tragic story of one girl that really captures the climate of fear and rage that has come to define life in a perpetual war zone.

When 12-year-old Easter and six-year-old Ruby's mother dies from an overdose, the two young sisters are put into a foster home. Their father, Wade, who had given up legal rights to the girls, finds them there and kidnaps them. Suspected of also having stolen a portion of the take in a multimillion-dollar theft from the man who masterminded the heist, Wade is being pursued by a psychopathic hit man determined to retrieve the stolen money. Also in pursuit is Brady Weller, a former policeman who is the girls' court-appointed guardian. Who will find Wade and the girls first is clearly a matter of life and death. Cash (A Land More Kind Than Home, 2012) tells his fast-moving, suspenseful story from three points of view: Easter's, Weller's, and the hit man Pruitt's. Both Wade and Pruitt are former baseball players, and Cash has cleverly folded another chase into their story: Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa's pursuit of a new home-run record. Set in the Carolinas, Cash's novel is a fine example of reader-pleasing southern storytelling in the mold of Ron Rash and Tom Franklin.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2010 Booklist

Cash's follow up to his bestselling debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, picks up as Easter Quillby and her younger sister reconnect with their deadbeat father, Wade. With help from Brady Weller, an ex-cop, Wade and the daughters are on the run from cliched bad man Pruitt, who on multiple occasions raises his sunglasses to deliver punch lines as he hunts Wade for stealing money from his gangster boss. The plot unfolds against a backdrop of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa's race to break the season home run record-an all-too-obvious metaphor for the main story, which culminates in a bathroom confrontation at a baseball stadium where the two players meet. Most of Cash's characters lay flatly within the high drama of the plot. Brady's friend, the Black & Mild-smoking, rap-music-listening Roc, the novel's most notable character of color, delivers cringe-worthy lines like, "What up, playa?" and "Damn, son." Even fans of Cash's first novel may find the melodrama of his latest more of a quick fix than a memorable read. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.