KING OF ASHES, by S.A. Cosby
S.A. Cosby’s propulsive and powerful fifth novel of Southern noir, “King of Ashes,” begins with a brief, haunting dream of youth, longing and blood. Roman Carruthers — the novel’s protagonist, who escaped his crumbling hometown, Jefferson Run, Va., and now is a wealthy investment manager with a lavish lifestyle in Atlanta — wakes to learn that his father has been in a mysterious car accident and is in a coma.
Roman — cynical and pragmatic, imperious and loyal — returns home, but upon arrival, discovers that his family is in shambles. His chain-smoking sister, Neveah, is exhausted and embittered after having been left to shoulder the responsibility of managing the family crematory, and his younger brother, Dante, is adrift, struggling with addiction and acting more like a teenager than the 30-year-old that he is. Seeing them now, Roman realizes that when he fled Jefferson Run, his family felt abandoned by him, and as the eldest sibling, he wants to make things right.
But after a matter of hours back in town, it becomes violently clear that their father’s “accident” is connected to Dante. His brother, mired in shame and despair, is deep in debt to the local gang that dominates Jefferson Run. Since Dante has failed to pay, these lethal men want more than their standard pound of flesh. Roman, acting as a cunning businessman and Dante’s big brother, imagines he is prepared to appease them.
Over the years, Roman has become an expert in fixing sordid misdeeds and trafficking in secrets — insider trading, his clients’ scandals, his own sexual predilections. Except he has never had to deal with gangsters whose appetite for bloodshed is relentless, who kill and maim with impunity. This is not the world of mannered boardrooms where the human cost is a detached, neatly packaged bottom line. In order to protect his family and avenge his father, Roman must risk mirroring the gang’s savagery and getting his soul dirty.
What follows is a gripping roller coaster ride of escalating danger in cars and crematories, punctuated by pulpy moments of dark glamour in the bedroom and the club, interspersed with elegiac meditations on the art of war. The story overflows with immersive velocity and crackling sensory details, and Cosby flawlessly conjures Jefferson Run as a poverty-stricken Southern city with a cratered economy and corrupt city officials, from the mayor to the police. Its abandoned buildings and decaying streets are dominated by this bloodthirsty local gang, whose businesses are drugs, guns, clubs and even the best restaurant in town.
Vibrating underneath the family’s present peril is an open wound: the mystery of Roman’s mother’s sudden disappearance 20 years ago. Jefferson Run still whispers about whether she left to start another life or was murdered, and rumors of their father’s involvement persist. Their mother’s absence has become the family’s shadow, a weight that has always kept them tethered to Jefferson Run, even when they imagined they had escaped.
The novel is most often in Roman’s absorbing close-third-person perspective, and through his eyes we see the effect of the violence that surrounds him — the drive-by shootings, disappearances and other cruel acts that destroy the lives of both the innocent and those entangled in this drama. As the novel progresses, it becomes reminiscent of Jacobean revenge tragedies, where ruthless ambition and paranoia play out as the body count climbs higher and higher.
The book also dips into the perspectives of his siblings and other townsfolk. We get Neveah’s point of view as she attempts to unravel what happened to their mother and figure out if the rumors about their father are true. She is the book’s disillusioned, grieving detective while Dante is the tender heart, delivering some of the book’s most astute lines. As he warns Roman, “It’s not karma I’m afraid of. It’s getting what I deserve. … Karma is what comes back to you for what you’ve done. Getting what you deserve is just what finds you eventually.”
Cosby is masterly at painting Roman into grim corners and making readers squirm, wondering how on earth he will get free, and if freedom is even possible in this world. Undergirding this dark thrill is the heartbreaking pull of family, of home, of the haunted South whose ghosts are not done with us. With Roman, Cosby has sculpted a character of Shakespearean proportions: kingly, devoted, shrewd. He reminds us of Hamlet, a tormented antihero struggling with how best to take revenge while preserving his soul in a depraved land.
But of course, the actions we perform, even in the name of love, can undo us and those we claim we are protecting. And it is Roman himself who says: “Money is like acid. It burns through everything. Friendships, family, lovers, husbands and wives.”
KING OF ASHES | By S.A. Cosby | Pine & Cedar | 333 pp. | $28.99
The post A Maestro of Crime Fiction Returns With a High-Octane Thriller appeared first on New York Times.
