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. Where as 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. 

 

 

New Year: The Crime TBR Stack

 Now that the new year posts, columns, and Substacks have died down, it's time to get down to business. In this case, reading business.

I'm currently in my annual reread of Rick Rubin's The Creative Act, but will be diving into non-fiction, crime fiction, science fiction, and whatever I did out of the local Little Libraries.

For crime, I have three books on the stack:

King of Ashes - SA Cosby

I used to start the year off with late Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor series. But now that Jack is done and Ken is no longer with us, I've picked up starting the year off with SA Cosby. Blacktop Wasteland, Razorblade Tears, All Sinners Bleed, and My Darkest Prayer were all great finds. While Cosby is not the poet Bruen was, he does have that same sense of place, its dark secrets, and characters who live and breathe on the page. Plus every book so far has been a gut punch. So I'm making his latest, about a Virginia family in a rural town who run a crematorium and must deal with criminals who want their money. 

 Hard Town - Adam Plantinga

I discovered Plantinga while researching the unpublished third Holland Bay novel. He wrote a guide for writers researching police procedure and culture, imbuing it with an unexpected level of humanity and humor. Not only are cops shown working day-to-day, but all the in-jokes among them and shared jokes between them and their brethren on the fire department came through.

And then he wrote a novel, Hard Town. Kurt Argento is a retired and widowed cop who moves to Arizona for the quiet life of a handyman. When a woman and her son show up asking for help, Argenta tells her he's no investigator. He's done with that life. But then she disappears, and like Stephen King's Derry, Maine, he discovers his new home of Fenton, Arizona is something much dakrer than it appears.

Moonraker - Ian Fleming 

A Nazi who builds rockets? Who would ever believe that?

Fleming's Bond is more of a gangster fighter, even if some of the gangsters were Soviet spies and assassins. So, while Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, and Diamonds Are Forever hued closer to the real world than the movies based on them, the book Moonraker proved as over-the-top and unbelievable as its own movie, a rip-off on Star Wars. The book debuted in the mid-1950s, when missing Nazis made convenient supervillains. The movie appeared in 1978 to cash in on George Lucas's unexpected hit.

Now? A Nazi building rockets. Was not on my bingo card for the 2020s.

Holiday Tradition: A Very Tom Waits Christmas

Mirimax

I pulled on Santa’s sleigh
Christmas Eve was dark, and the snow fell like cocaine off some politician’s coffee table
Rudolph looked to the sky. He had a shiny nose, but it was from too much vodka
He said, “Boys, it’s gonna be a rough one this year.”

I pulled on Santa’s sleigh
The elves scrambled to pack up the last of the lumps of coal for deserving suburban brats
And a bottle of Jamie for some forgotten soul whose wife just left him
Santa’s like that. He’s been there.
Oh, he still loves Mrs. Claus, a spent piece of used sleigh trash who
Makes good vodka martinis, knows when to keep her mouth shut
But it’s the loneliness, the loneliness only Santa knows

I pulled on Santa’s sleigh
And the workshop reeks of too much peppermint
The candy canes all have the names of prostitutes
And Santa stands there, breathing in the loneliness
The loneliness that creeps out of the main house
And out through the stables
Sometimes it follows the big guy down the chimneys
Wraps itself around your Tannenbaum and sleeps in your hat

I pulled on Santa’s sleigh
We all line up for the annual ride
I’m behind Vixen, who’s showin’ her age these days
She has a certain tiredness that comes with being the only girl on the team
Ah, there’s nothing wrong with her a hundred dollars wouldn’t fix
She’s got a teardrop tattooed under her eye now, one for every year Dancer’s away

I pulled on Santa’s sleigh and
I asked myself, “That elf. What’s he building in there?”
He has no elf friends, no elf children
What’s he building in there?
He doesn’t make toys like the other elves
I heard he used to work for Halliburton,
And he’s got an ex-wife in someplace called Santa Claus, Indiana
But what’s he building in there?
We got a right to know.

I pulled on Santa’s sleigh
And we’re off
Off into the night
Watching the world burn below
All chimney red and Halloween orange

I’ve seen it all
I’ve seen it all
Every Christmas Eve, I’ve seen it all
There’s nothing sadder than landing on a roof in a town with no cheer.