S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed is a satisfying crime novel that has deeper layers. Black sheriff Titus Crown oversees Charon County in the state of Virginia. The novel starts out with a school shooting, but soon leads to much darker crimes.
Crown is a fully fleshed out character. A good man haunted by something that happened when he was an FBI agent, his life is orderly to the extreme. Inside, he carries the grief of his mother’s death and a highly developed sense of justice. Charon is a county with a large Black population, but it is also teeming with white supremacists and good old boys who lament the end of the Confederacy. Crown is committed to protecting the whole community, but especially his Black community, who have suffered for generations under white abuse, particularly by law enforcement.
Religion and faith is a significant theme in the book. Titus does not believe in god, although his father is a loving and faithful churchgoer. Titus is in fact bitter about god, who didn’t answer his prayers as he wished for his mother’s recovery. His father gently tries to comfort his son, who is rife with guilt, but Titus is not swayed, as much as he loves his father. He has a brother, Marquis–sometimes in trouble with the law–who he also loves, and who tries to help ease Titus’s overdeveloped feelings of responsibility for his mother, his family, and the entire town.
After the school shooting, terrible crimes are revealed involving the deaths of seven Black children. Titus and his team work to find the killer, a sadistic monster who committed his crimes with a pedophile until the pedophile was killed in the school shooting. The book is very, very dark when it comes to the type of crimes featured. Content warnings abound. But the story is anchored around Titus and his attempts to keep evil and chaos at bay, which balances the darkness.
This is a compelling book that I read in one day. The book is strengthened by its excellent characterization and social commentary about racism and its impact on Black people. The author S.A. Cosby is Black, and the world he creates rings with an authenticity that makes the story all the more powerful.