All the Sinners Bleed (2023) by Anthony award-winning S.A. Cosby was a gripping, frightening mystery/ thriller set in rural, coastal Virginia featuring former FBI agent, and the county’s first Black sheriff, Titus Crown. Racial tensions are coming to a head, with local white people wanting to parade in support of a Confederate statue and Titus wanting to keep the peace as a law enforcement officer. He lives with his father, who recently had hip replacement surgery, and is trying to forget the FBI matter that he survived but left many of his team dead.
Titus’s skills are put to the test when a beloved teacher is killed in a school shooting, and the perpetrator, a troubled son of one of his friends, is killed by one of his deputies on the school steps. Turns out the troubled kid and the teacher were involved in something worse than just a school shooting, and now Titus is searching for a serial killer who has been killing black children in plain sight for years.
Cosby’s writing is superb and full of truths, and the premise heartbreaking and terrifying. I could not stop reading, and though it involved serious abuse of children, Cosby avoided describing the worst of the abuse. He did an amazing job of portraying how dealing with finding evidence of such abuse affects the public servants who discover it and try to find the perpetrators. If you like your mysteries full of Southern atmosphere and featuring justice for racists, don’t miss this one. I”m going to work my way through Cosby’s backlist because All the Sinners Bleed was so riveting. It was also completely weight-neutral.
Reading While Fat 