by S.A. Cosby ★★★★★
It will come as no surprise to see an S.A. Cosby novel at or near the top of my "Best Books of the Year" list. Blacktop Wasteland was my #1 book of 2020, and Cosby's followup Razorblade Tears finished #4 in 2021. So to say I was excitedly anticipating All the Sinners Bleed is an understatement. And I'm happy to say that it overdelivered on those very high expectations.
Like Cosby's previous two novels, All the Sinners Bleed is set in the rural counties of eastern Virginia, this time in the fictional county of Charon. The county is small and most residents spend their entire lives there. As a result, there are few strangers among them. The novel's main protagonist, Sheriff Titus Crown, was one of the few to make it out of Charon. After college at UVA and a masters from Columbia, Titus spent time with the FBI before a difficult case and his father's ailing health brought him back to the county of his birth. He chose to run for sheriff, narrowly won, and now attempts to keep the peace as the first Black man in that seat, overseeing a county in the south that, despite electing him, hasn't fully accepted someone who looks like him holding that position.
The novel opens with what has become all too common these days -- a school shooting. A beloved teacher is murdered, and the gunman is killed by Titus's deputies before he can be disarmed. The investigation into the school shooting is what opens up the main plot and mystery of the story. The teacher, the gunman, and a third man who Titus starts to think of as "The Last Wolf" were engaged in abhorrent behavior involving the children of Charon. Two are dead, but one still prowls, and Sheriff Crown makes it his personal mission to find and stop The Last Wolf.
While I loved Cosby's previous two books, I was a bit worried going into this one that he was settling into to a formulaic approach to his writing. As I noted in my review of Razorblade Tears, "I’m just going to say it: this is 'Blacktop Wasteland 2'." While Cosby clearly has a style, All the Sinners Bleed is distinctly different from Blacktop Wasteland or Razorblade Tears. I love that he chose to write about a lawman (his previous main characters did not typically "operate within the confines of the law"), and a Black one at that. While Cosby does not fully explore the complexities of law enforcement and the Black community in the novel, it obviously comes up enough that it is addressed, and having that conversation through a main character who is both Black and a police officer is a smart way to approach it. Cosby creates a character with depth and a backstory and allows the reader to see all of the conflict within him. Whether it's Crown trying to find peace from the events of his past, working to build relationships with his family or his girlfriend, or struggling to walk the razor's edge between all the different directions in which the community pulls him, he's a man constantly waging an internal war with himself.
Cosby does not shy away from live wire issues in any of his books, and All the Sinners Bleed is consistent in that as well. He once again incorporates race relations as a major component of the novel, and this time adds some pointed commentary on religion. I had no idea what Cosby personally thought about religion, but because it's such a significant component of All the Sinners Bleed, it's come up in interviews about the book. Here's a quick summary from a Publisher's Weekly interview with Cosby:
S.A. Cosby lost his faith in a single afternoon. Growing up in Mathews County, Va.—a community of 8,000 served by 23 churches—the crime writer attended regular services at a 19th-century Pentecostal congregation founded by his great-grandfather. In the 1980s, when Cosby was 11, his mother—who’d suffered from spinal stenosis for his entire life—took him to a faith-healing tent revival. On the way in, the pair spotted some men smoking cigarettes with their backs to attendees; when the service began, the same men donned crutches and feigned blindness before hitting the stage to be “healed.”
“In that moment, my mother said to me, ‘They’re not healing nobody here. They’re just healing their pockets,’” recalls Cosby during a Zoom call from his home in Southeastern Virginia. “And that shaped my own relationship with religion and spirituality.”
Cosby has imprinted onto Titus Crown a lot of those same sentiments, as well as some of the reasons for feeling that way. After watching his mother dies from a debilitating disease, and seeing the dark underbelly of humanity through his work, Crown feels abandoned by God, and he makes that position very clearly known throughout the book. He calls out everything from hypocrisies in interpretation of scripture to misappropriation of church funds. Cosby typically presents more of a multi-viewed, nuanced take on some of those live wire issues, but there's little balance in All the Sinners Bleed. Religion is a scourge, as far as Titus Crown is concerned. At the same time, Crown can identify or recite almost any passage from the Bible, which creates an interesting exploration of the topic, demonstrating that Crown was very much a believer at one point, before reversing his position. It also suggests that Crown's opinion is one he didn't arrive at quickly or without a lot of information. I say all of that simply because I think this may be a difficult read if God and faith are an important part of your life.
This is a really tightly crafted mystery, down to the final page and resolution. Cosby's deeply developed characters and social commentary elevate the story beyond others in the genre, but even without that, this would be among the better mysteries I've read in a while. When you layer in that depth, this rises to be something really special. There’s a ton of layered tension throughout the novel; it’s tightly plotted, the characters have depth, and it was thoroughly satisfying. Across everything I read in 2023, this checked the most boxes, and for that reason it takes this year’s crown as my Best Book of 2023.
Previous Best of 2023: #2 - The Covenant of Water