King of Ashes

by S.A. Cosby ★★★★★

In the years I've been doing my Best Books of the Year rankings, books by S.A. Cosby have finished 1st (Blacktop Wasteland in 2020), 4th (Razorblade Tears in 2021), and 1st (All the Sinners Bleed in 2023). As such, my expectations were through the roof for King of Ashes. Once again, Cosby delivers.

Roman Carruthers is a successful financial advisor to high net worth clients in Atlanta. But when he gets a call from his sister in rural Virginia telling him his father's had an accident and is in a coma, he immediately puts his lucrative business life on hold to return to his childhood home in Jackson Run. The family he rushes toward—his father Keith, his sister Neveah, and his younger brother Dante—aren't people he speaks to regularly these days. While their mutual love is entrenched and untouchable, their like for each other waxes and wanes. Neveah harbors resentment because she feels like Roman left her to carry the burden of helping their father with the family business, a crematory that he and their mother built from the ground up. Dante is the family fuck-up, who possesses a sweet soul but a propensity for making monumentally bad decisions. Missing from the equation is their mother, who disappeared almost 20 years prior, and has left an unhealed scar on every member of the family. The rumor in Jackson Run, persistent still to this day, is that Keith Carruthers killed her after discovering her well-known infidelity and disposed of her body in his crematory oven. But his visible grief every year on the anniversary of the day she went missing suggests that's unlikely.

Roman plans to stick around for a few weeks in the hopes his dad will awaken from his coma. As he reintegrates into life with his siblings, Dante soon confesses that he got on the wrong side of some bad people, a local gang known as the Black Baron Boys (or the "BBB" for short). "Rome, they're bad. They just ... they bad, man. We should've never fucked with them dudes. They crazy, and they ...just ain't the ones to fuck with," Dante tells his brother. He owes them $300,000 for a substantial drug shipment that "went missing". Roman agrees to help Dante parlay with the leaders of the BBB, a pair of brothers known as Torrent and Tranquil Gilchrist. Dante is skeptical, but Roman feels confident that compared to the high powered financial negotiations he's accustomed to navigating, this shouldn't be a problem. He couldn't be more wrong.

As Dante suggested, the leaders of the BBB are truly crazy and vicious. Torrent wields his power indiscriminately, and unleashes his sadistic brother Tranquil on anyone and anything with little-to-no provocation. Roman's arrogance does more than a little to provoke Torrent, and the Carruthers brothers barely survive the meeting. The only reason they're still living is that Roman convinces the Gilchrist brothers that he can use his skills as a money manager to make the BBB a lot of money, beyond what Dante owes. He also offers access to the crematory, a convenient body disposal service that is of value to a gang who is creating corpses on a weekly basis.

At the same time, Roman realizes there is only one way out. "Men like Torrent, they don't respect anything or anyone. They'll kill you just as quick as they look at you because they can. Because somebody told them they were in charge. It's like the old Lord Acton quote about power. It corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. When you're working for men like that, there's only one way it ends: in ashes." With one tiny misstep, his life (and his family's) could be forfeit, but Roman hatches a plan to get close enough to the Gilchrist brothers, make them so much money that they can't help but keep him around, and then eventually turn the tables.

But to do so, he is forced to start to bend his own moral code. Like many of Cosby's previous main characters, Roman finds himself having to justify an increasing number of immoral decisions in support of a commendable larger goal. His family's safety is the only thing that matters to him, and so if bad things happen to others in pursuit of that goal, it's okay. "There was a startling banality to the statement that made Roman's skin crawl. It was as if they were discussing how they took their coffee, not disposing of a dead body. Not like you don't have experience with that, Roman thought. There was a certain hypocrisy in his disgust he couldn't ignore. I'm not like him. I'm not like Torrent and Tranquil. I don't enjoy it. I don't get off on it. And it'll never become normal to me."

Cosby is known for novels that contain more violence than most, but even by his standards King of Ashes is especially brutal at times. The Black Baron Boys may be the cruelest and most sadistic of any of the antagonists that Cosby has created, and the constant threat of peril generated by their violence and unpredictability is fairly terrifying, perhaps because the Carruthers brothers are almost always in close proximity to it. But like with Cosby's other works, the layers he builds elevates the story beyond the grit and the violence. The impact of their mother's disappearance on the siblings and Neveah's quest to find out the truth introduces a companion storyline, and Roman beginning a romantic relationship with the last person in town he should be creates an extra layer of complexity. It all melds together to create a novel full of tension from start to finish.

It's edgy, it's violent, and it's dark, but it's also Cosby continuing to push himself to be better, and it lives up to the high bar he set with his previous novels. It's not a happy book, and it will leave you gutted at times, but it's another gritty winner from a can't-miss author for me.