Few authors have ever belatedly burst on the scene quite like Virginia storyteller SA Cosby has during the pandemic. An award-winning short story writer who’d been honing his craft for two decades, Cosby’s superb second novel Blacktop Wasteland was a Southern Noir masterpiece and word-of-mouth hit, and put a slew of major awards on his shelf. His third, Razorblade Tears, again swept the Anthony, Barry, Macavity, and ITW Thriller Awards (a historic first), among other accolades in Europe and North America.

How do you follow that up? Well, Cosby, somehow, may have raised his extremely high bar even higher with All the Sinners Bleed. His multi-layered storytelling, poetic ferocity, and masterful blend of emotional, thoughtful, and violence is here in high doses.

Titus Crown is an ex-FBI agent who’s now the first-ever Black sheriff of his hometown. Murders seem rare: two in recent decades. But when a high school teacher is killed by a former student, who’s then shot by Titus’s deputies, the lid is ripped off a Pandora’s box of festering secrets and horrific crimes. Meanwhile a Far Right group is keen to honour the town’s Confederate history.

Cosby brilliantly soaks readers in the complexities of the American South while delivering a powerful tale of a man under siege.

Outstanding.

Reviewed by Craig Sisterson

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