This Dark Road to Mercy
A Novel
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4.3 • 60 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Wiley Cash follows up his spooky debut, A Land More Kind Than Home, with a second novel that’s simultaneously poignant and exhilarating. This Dark Road to Mercy is a brief, beautiful meditation on family, forgiveness, and the possibility of redemption. It’s also a rip-roaring thriller about two newly motherless girls, their absentee father, a road trip, a desperate hit man, two baseball superstars, and one former cop whose dedication to his job has cost him (almost) everything. Cash's dialogue crackles off the page, and his empathy for his flawed characters is palpable and contagious.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 clich d 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.
Customer Reviews
Getting better
I liked it better than the first one and feel this writer becoming better and better so that I can't wait for the next book. The characters, Easter and Ruby and Wade are so real and believable that you would like to meet them later in life to see how things turned out for them. Excellent book. Captivated me from page one and I finished it in two days. more, please!
This Dark Road to Mercy
I thought A Land More Kind Than Home was much better. This book had too many unnecessary details that seemed to be added to stretch what would have been a somewhat entertaining short story into a novel.
This Dark Road to Mercy
Read the entire book in one sitting. Lovely words, characters that I could immediately envision, powerful story, did not want it to end.