At the outset: this book is not for the faint of heart. If you’ve read any prior S.A. Cosby novels, you know that violence–gritty, ugly, cruel, unvarnished–is an integral part of his characters’ worlds. These characters are usually trying to escape violence, but it comes for them due to fate, personal choice, or some combination of both. One of my favorite aspects of Cosby’s oeuvre is that blodshed is never pretty or glorified. The main characters, because they are essentially human, despise the carnage that […]

Titus Crown is overqualified to be the sheriff of rural Charon County, Va. He went to UVa on a football scholarship, Columbia for grad school, and spent a decade working on domestic terrorism cases with the FBI. But after a raid gone bad at a fundamentalist compound, Titus moved back into his childhood home and ran for sheriff, hoping to clean up a history of racial prejudice and corruption. His first big challenge comes when a troubled young Black man walks into the local high […]