King of Ashes

 As I've written before, SA Cosby has replaced Ken Bruen as the first crime author I read in a given year. That's probably going to slow down unless he's got another one coming out this year. (Shame on me for not checking.) So, instead of Jack Taylor, I get to read about a side of Virginia we never see. Set in fictional Jefferson City, Cosby establishes his setting as lying near the real city of Roanoke, in the southwestern part of the state. This region has little in common with the Tidewater, Chesapeake Bay, or the urban sprawl of Richmond and the DC suburbs. It has more in common with West Virginia, just on the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. 

We open with Roman Carruthers, a financial mogul in Atlanta who makes money magic happen for all manner of athlete, musician, and actor. We briefly see Roman in his element, living in Buckheads, approaching his craft like a science, and contracting the services of a dominatrix to relax him before a major meeting or decision. Like you do.

Then he gets a phone call. His father is in a coma after being hit by a train. Roman flies home after a five-year absence to help with the family business. A crematorium. His sister Neveah runs the shop with her father and is pretty much in charge when we meet her. Brother Danta...

Well, he's why Dad is in a coma. And then there's the matter of their mother, who disappeared. Their father caught her cheating. She disappeared. When the wife of a crematorium operator disappears, it's almost impossible to conclude what happened to her and why there is no body.

But the present situation, someone pushing the elder Carruthers' car into an oncoming freight train's path, ties back to Dante. By his own description, he is the family disappointment. So Roman sets about to fix this. Dante is in debt to some very bad characters named Torrent and Tagent, both sociopaths, and both ruling by fear. Roman works his way into their inner circle by offering to make them money instead of straight up paying Dante's debt. Things spiral from there.

Roman uses his talents both to bring in money for those Dante owes and to set Torrent and Tangent's people against each other and their enemies against them. Complicating matters is a woman Roman meets at a party: Jealousy. Jealousy, or Jae as she calls herself, works for the mayor. She's also Torrent and Tanget's sister. Roman falls for her, but he's out to kill her brothers. It's as messy as messy can be. 

Roman is, of course, the center of this mess. While trying to save his siblings, he becomes the reverse of The Wire's Stringer Bell. Whereas Bell used his money to get out of the game and into respectability, Roman starts out respectable and spirals into the game. 

Over all, this is what Cosby does best. He mixes Southern life, race, poverty, and the disruption of crime into a mile-a-minute tale. The crematory makes for an interesting backdrop and a plot point in several threads. However, it doesn't quite live up to his masterpieces, Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears. But then not every Beatles album is Sgt. Pepper's or every Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon. Just as reaching for those bands off your streaming service still delivers great music, so does pulling SA Cosby from the shelf.

Three Books in 2022

Since about 2011, I've kept a spreadsheet of what I've read over a given year. Thanks to multiple formats, the number's been as high as 100. Thanks to Audible, it's never gone as low as 30. Last year, I read 52. One of them was a book on speed-reading.

I read widely. I'm working my way through Stephen King's back list, and with any luck, Billy Summers will be one of the last books I read this year. I do a rotation. Non-fiction of some sort, crime, science fiction, an indie writer who's caught my attention, a classic, and King. Part, but not all, of the classic side includes Harry Bloom's novel list from How to Read. I'll spare you the rest as the non-fiction tends to be all over the map, and SF is not really the purpose of Sleuthsayers. So, let's focus on crime.

Every year since about the mid-2000s, I've started off with Ken Bruen, mainly the Jack Taylor series. Assuming 2022 does not involve kaiju, nuclear annihilation, another great plague, alien invasion, or Ken writing one more Jack Taylor, I will probably finish the series in January of 2023. For January, 2022, I'm reading Galway Girl. I was not a big fan of Em when she appeared in the series. I couldn't figure out if Ken was passing the baton to a young woman even more rage-prone than Jack or something else. (Spoiler alert: Something else.) But then, at the end of In the Galway Silence, he introduces a woman who is a clone of Em, and, it seems, by choice. She calls herself Jericho, and yes, she is there to make Jack's life a living hell. Only, whenever someone wants to torment Jack, they have to get in line. At the head of the line, they inevitably find out Jack calls that "Tuesday."  Ken doesn't so much write a novel with the Taylor series as much as write violent epic poems set in Galway. Galway Girl is proving to be a dark, bleak novel full of nihilism and death. It's a marvelous way to start off a new year full of hope and optimism. (Or at least the fleeting hope that the hangover from 2020 will finally lift.)

The next crime novel on the list is SA Cosby's Razor Blade Tears. I'd like to compare Cosby to Ken Bruen, but the first thing by him that I read, Black Top Wasteland, I found too optimistic. Seriously, though, I read Wasteland last year after connection with Shawn online. It was probably the best crime novel I'd read in a long time, so both Razor Blade Tears and his upcoming All Sinners Bleed are on this year's TBR stack. Cosby writes about the South, does not shy away from race, yet writes about a world not too dissimilar from where I grew up, which was seventies and eighties Rust Belt. Like Blacktop, Blade is about an ordinary man without privilege who has his life upended by crime, in this case, the murder of his son. What's amazing about Cosby's work is the characters may lead a different life from most of us, but the landmarks on their path are quite often all-too-familiar.

Third on the list is Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. Set in 1954, its premise has a lot in common with SA Cosby's work. A young man released from a juvenile work farm is driven home to Nebraska. He intends to pick up his recently orphaned brother and head for California to start a new life. Two of his fellow inmates have secretly tagged along with another plan: They want to take him to New York. Lincoln Highway covers more familiar territory for me geographically, rolling across the Midwest, though it's a time when the steel mills still roared, Studebakers still rolled off the assembly lines alongside Packards, and steam powered the railways.

There will be more, obviously. Someone who read 52 books last year, with every sixth Kindle, paperback, or hardcover a crime novel, these three are only enough to get me through early spring.

So, what's on your TBR stack for this year?