From S.A. Cosby, author of Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears, All the Sinners Bleed is a lushly dark mystery set in fictional Charon County in Southeastern Virginia and starring a Black sheriff in a town that's not at all sure it's ready for one. Recently elected Sheriff Titus Crown is out to right some wrongs from the inside: police corruption, racism and profiling, law enforcers living above the law. He's also dodging a few traumas of his own. Having come home to Charon County means he gets to live with and help his aging father, but it also means he's reminded of his beloved late mother. His brother lives in town but rarely comes around. Titus has a local girlfriend who's very sweet and good for him, but sort of unremarkable; he has a sense he should love her more. He's haunted by the events that ended his FBI career in Indiana. Running a small staff of deputies in a small Southern town has its own challenges, mostly manageable ones; he hopes to redeem himself in this way from wrongs only hinted at.

But then there's a call about an active gunman at the high school in town. In minutes, Titus is looking at a popular teacher of decades shot to death in his classroom, and a young Black man killed by deputies while the school--and via their cell phone videos, the entire Internet--watched. Before Latrell Macdonald died, "with a wolf's snout in his left hand and cradling a .30-30 like a newborn in the crook of his right arm," he spoke of crimes that make Titus's blood run cold. The ensuing investigation will crack Charon County wide open, and challenge to the core Titus's plans to clean up his hometown and make amends for things that happened in Indiana.

Titus is no investigative slouch. "His instructors at the Academy had their own version of String Theory. The way they explained it, there were invisible strings that vibrated unseen in the liminal spaces between sunrise and secrets, between rumor, shadows, and lies. Strings that pulled all this together. All you had to do was find the seam and unravel it. Or rip it apart." His years with the Bureau and training under his friend and mentor there give him an edge on profiling and pursuing an enemy who seems determined to toy with him. He finds the remains of badly tortured and murdered Black boys and girls; as he investigates, the body count only rises. An old girlfriend from his FBI years appears, asking to interview him for her crime podcast; his father pleads with him to come back to church. The Sons of the Confederacy are planning a march at the upcoming Fall Fest, and a strange story surfaces about a reclusive fire-and-brimstone snake-handling preacher. Increasingly distressed at his inability to keep his county safe, Titus is plagued by memories and the present evil attacking his home. On less and less sleep, he doggedly puts in work. "He went over a few other emails, reviewed the gas expense reports, checked the arrest log from last night, updated the Sheriff department's social media page.... It felt strange to attend to the mundane and the profane at the same time but that was a defining aspect of the job."

All the Sinners Bleed is noir with a particular American Southern twist. Place figures heavily. "The soil of Charon County, like most towns and counties in the South, was sown with generations of tears.... Blood and tears. Violence and mayhem. Love and hate. These were the rocks upon which the South was built." Cosby deals in timely themes: returning home and reckoning with old wounds and crimes; the unsavory histories of the places we love; the legacies of Confederate statues, of slavery and racism; the darkness within all of us, even those playing the good guys; the role of police and policing. His prose is gruff, poetic but stark: "The clouds gathered like young men on a corner getting ready for a fight." Titus has a code like that of Michael Connelly's Detective Harry Bosch: "Either we all matter or no one matters. Everyone deserves to have someone speak for them." He believes that something hard and mean dwells in every heart--and in a few, true evil. What has beset Charon County is not supernatural. It is merely the wages of sin (as his churchgoing neighbors might say), or the county's bloody past coming back around. There is something of the lone gunslinger--damaged but virtuous--in Titus Crown, who stands against the worst elements of human nature. Like Cosby's previous novels, All the Sinners Bleed is often grim, but it lands on a surprisingly hopeful, even joyful ending.

For fans of gritty, dark mysteries with an interest in the very real and contemporary demons of United States culture and history, Cosby's work offers a sinister but satisfying voyage into the best and worst of returning home and starting fresh. --Julia Kastner

(Sam Sauter Photography)

S.A. Cosby is an Anthony Award-winning writer from Southeastern Virginia. He is the author of My Darkest Prayer, Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears. His fourth novel, All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron Books, June 6, 2023), introduces Sheriff Titus Crown, who has returned to his Southern hometown and is out to right some wrongs from the inside. When not writing, Cosby is an avid hiker and chess player.

Is Sheriff Titus Crown a hero?

He is, but like all heroes, he's flawed. Flawless heroes are boring. It's the reason they had to give Superman kryptonite. A perfect hero is aesthetically something to aspire to, but existentially it's a bit of a dud. It makes the hero stronger that they're able to overcome those flaws and still do the right thing.

How well does he fit the classic loner noir detective model?

He is a classic noir detective--even though he's the elected sheriff, he has more in common with Philip Marlowe than with Wyatt Earp. But he has a strong support system that a lot of those classic heroes didn't have. He has his dad, his brother--I really love their relationship--his girlfriend and some of his deputies. Even though he's their boss, he does respect and lean on them. But at the end of the day, he is the lone man standing up for what's right. He's the one that has to face the devil, eventually, by himself, and that's by design. I'm fascinated with what somebody does when they're faced with a life-changing moment. How do they stand up? And it's most interesting to me when they stand up in those moments alone. You know, character is what you do when no one is looking. I wanted to firmly put him in that situation.

How important is a character's backstory?

Incredibly important. When I create characters, I do their full biographies, and a lot of the time none of that makes it into the book. I create long documents about their childhood, their past, their likes and dislikes, intrinsic quirks. Even things that will never be revealed completely still influence the character's arc, their decisions, their decision-making process. You don't need to know everything about Titus, but you need to know that the things that have happened to him have shaped him, have defined his morals and his idealism, and his small bit of nihilism.

Titus is part of that tradition of the lone wolf, but he's also very much in the tradition of the local boy made good. Charon County is so much a part of who he is, whether he's in the FBI or, now, the sheriff. There is a proprietary sense about him. He cares about this place, and he knows some of the people--most of the people--don't particularly care for him because he's the sheriff, but he still feels protective of this place. The roots of Charon are so deep in his psyche.

What makes for a compelling villain or protagonist?

Your protagonist is only as good as your villain. You need a villain that matches the protagonist in drive and intellectually, but also personality-wise. Eminem and Kid Rock were both coming up in Detroit at the same time as rappers, and people would ask him why he would never battle Kid Rock. And he said, because beating him wouldn't have meant anything, because I don't respect his skill. He didn't see him as a worthy opponent. For Titus, I wanted the villain that he has to face to be a genuine threat, not just physically but intellectually, because I wanted his triumph to mean something.

When readers get to the end of the book, they'll realize that Titus understands some of what the villain has gone through. That creates a pretty interesting dynamic, to show the differences between these two characters. There are elements in their background that are similar, but whereas Titus went the way of wanting to protect people and not giving in to the pain of his past, the villain chose another route.

How important is place to this narrative?

Place is important in all my stories, but I think it's the most important aspect of this story. In my previous books I've written about place as a more general, macro idea. I've written about THE SOUTH, all capital letters, what that entails and what that means. I've spoken ad nauseum about how proud I am to be from the South but at the same time how much I recognize the flaws that are here. As an artist, I think it's my duty to examine that. With this book I really wanted to delve into the micro of that, and what's it's like in a town like Charon, which has a deep history. It has this sort of mythic quality to it. The citizens experience it in totally different ways. The white citizens experience it differently than the Black citizens. The young citizens experience it differently than the older folks. This town can have a multiplicity of definitions based on who you are and what your background is. I think place gives the story its weight. Charon County is a secondary protagonist and antagonist in the book.

Is this a novel about race?

In Southern fiction four things will always come up: race, class, sex and religion. Those are the four pillars of Southern gothic fiction. All are represented to various degrees in All the Sinners Bleed. As an African American person, I'm always going to write about race, because race is always a part of the conversation for me. People ask, why do you have to bring up race? I didn’t bring it up. This country brought it up; my life brings it up. Race is important, because Titus is a Black man, the first Black sheriff in this town. But religion is also on the forefront, maybe even more so, because in the rural South, there is an incredible hypocrisy that comes up with religion. Small towns with 25, 30 churches talk about Christianity as a concept but not as a practice. Flannery O'Conner said she doesn't believe the South is Christ-centered, but Christ-haunted. And I believe that's emblematic of the hypocrisy of the modern Christian evangelical movement, that you purport to love your sisters and brothers in Christ, but you vote against helping people, you vote against empathy. You live in a world where you thump a Bible and worry about the lives of children, so to speak, but once those children are out of the womb you could not care less about them. I wanted to talk about all of that. Religion can be a hammer to break down doors or it can be a cudgel to beat you down, and I think it's represented in both ways in the book.

Is it difficult or draining to write bleak stories? Or is there catharsis there?

It's never as draining as you might think. I'm a pessimistic optimist; I write these bleak characters in these bleak situations, but my characters triumph in the end. Not without some difficulty, some wounds and some scars, but they triumph. I was raised Southern Baptist, and I have this Old Testament philosophy that "I've never seen the righteous forsaken," to quote Titus's father. I write these really dark, morally complex characters and situations because I want the good guys to win, because that doesn't really happen in real life. If it's going to happen anywhere, it should happen in my book; I'm the one writing it. So as dark as my characters and their situations can be, they come through with the light in the end. --Julia Kastner