"Especially highly recommended for book clubs." — D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

"Distinctive and immersive." — Foreword Clarion Reviews (5-star review)

A multiracial family from New York returns, again and again, to Mobile, Alabama — drawn back by family ties to a place where a decades-old lynching still shapes the present. Their eighteen-year-old son has already begun to uncover what happened.

They arrive from the North with distance, money, and the quiet protections of privilege. In Mobile, those protections begin to thin. The past feels closer here — less abstract, more lived — and the divisions it produced remain visible in ways they cannot ignore. The family itself carries its own fault lines: a white father, a Black mother, and children who move between worlds, read differently depending on where they are.

At the center is eighteen-year-old Elijah, navigating the contradictions of identity, inheritance, and rage. As he pushes deeper into his family's past, what begins as a search for understanding starts to slip beyond his control, threatening consequences he cannot foresee.

Around him, each member of the family confronts their own fracture. His father retreats into systems of control, preparing for a future he believes is already collapsing. His mother resists a life shaped by fear and distance. His sister watches, reads, and searches for meaning in what remains unsaid.

Told through shifting interior voices, Ghost Gun explores family inheritance, race, class, mental illness, and the uneasy boundary between reckoning and destruction.