Crime author SA Cosby is now one of America’s leading crime authors. Following his successes with Blacktop Wasteland, Razorblade Tears and All the Sinners Bleed, his new novel, King of Ashes, is one of the most anticipated releases of 2025.
Cosby’s novels are set in the South and focus on the black experience in modern America. His prose is wonderful, but some of his success is down to his portrayal of family life. In Blacktop, for example, anti-hero, Bug, is unable to give up his love of illegal drag racing despite his promises to his family, with devastating results. At the heart of King of Ashes is a bickering trio of siblings; it feels like the author’s writing distilled down to its very essence.
Jefferson Run is a struggling Virginia town and a place Roman Carruthers hoped he’d never have to return to. He’s carved out a lucrative career for himself as an asset manager for the wealthy, but the pull of family calls him back. His father lies in a coma following a car crash, and it’s been left to his put-upon sister, Neveah, to run the family crematorium.
Dante, the youngest of the three, is adrift in a world of partying and drug taking, and hasn’t been pulling his weight. In fact, he hasn’t even been able to get it together enough to visit his father in hospital. Their mother, Bonita, disappeared many years ago, and the rumour that the old man killed her in a fit of jealousy and cremated her refuses to go away.
It doesn’t take long for Roman to discover the source of his family’s troubles. In a desperate bid to prove himself, Dante, along with two friends, borrowed $200,000 dollars worth of ecstasy and heroin from a local gang. The idea was to sell the drugs, turn a tidy profit, then pay back the Black Baron Brothers. Instead, they burned through some of the drugs and lost the rest – or so Dante naively believes. Now he and his friends don’t have the funds to pay the gangsters back.
Their father being run off the road was the first warning that time was running out. Roman arranges a sit down, confident he can use his professional skills to work out a deal. Instead, he’s handed a violent lesson that real gangsters are much different from the wannabe pop stars he usually works with.
Cosby writes impressively about the three children, especially the two men. Roman is serious, ambitious, confident and resentful about having to leave his Atlanta life behind. Dante is insecure, and feels his failures acutely. He knows he’s messing up, but can’t help making the wrong decisions. Neveah’s character is perhaps a little less fleshed out. Her role in keeping the family running in the background is one many women will recognise.
As in his other novels, the author brings the small town to life. There is that constant feeling of being smothered and needing to escape, a common part of the mythology of American popular music and writing.
Forced into working for the gang, Roman reasons that to save his brother and the family he’ll have to bring the Barons down from the inside. People, he decides, are all the same deep down and if he can use their greed against them, the gang members might turn on one another. But in this story, everyone really is greedy, and in order to get the gang to trust him, he has to show them his worth. One question the book asks is whether it’s worth saving yourself if you’ll damn yourself in the process?
Romantic subplots involving Neveah and a corrupt cop, and Roman with a gang member’s sister, add another colour to this story of crime and revenge. The ending is bleak – noir – and ties up the story, nicely including the mystery of Bonita’s disappearance.
For a look at the other side of the drug trade, see Don Winslow’s The Cartel.
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CFL Rating: 4 Stars
