Read @ Joe’s

Title: King of Ashes (2025) Author: S.A. Cosby Publisher: Pine & Cedar Book jacket: A son returning home. A dangerous debt. Secrets about to ignite . . . and a family consumed by flames. Joe says: A powerful novel full of flawed but recognizable characters, familial reckonings, and an internal dialogue that rarely comes up for air. But get ready, King of Ashes is dark.

S.A. Cosby’s latest Southern noir, King of Ashes, is another powerful novel full of flawed but recognizable characters, familial reckonings, and an internal dialogue that rarely comes up for air. And on top of that? Man, get ready, King of Ashes is dark. Not the metaphorical kind of dark where hope flickers at the edges, but a smothering, oppressive loam that coats every breath and is a struggle to see through let alone rise above. Yet Cosby keeps the music playing like an Italian opera, which, admittedly, is better than a funeral dirge.

Outside of the genre trappings of gang banging and drug dealing and gun running, King of Ashes is truly about family and the profound strides one will take in that cause. When Keith Carruthers is left in a coma from a not-so-innocent hit-and-run, Roman, his eldest, comes home to Jefferson Run, VA to help Neveah run the family crematory. A hot situation, but the real fire comes from within the family itself. Dante, the baby of the bunch, is deep in addiction and getting deeper. Roman, naively – perhaps arrogantly –  believes he can clean up the mess using his financial resources. Instead of rising above, Roman sinks into the quagmire.

Within this novel, Cosby explores powerful, masculine themes: grief, guilt, blood loyalty, pain, pleasure. Roman carries so much weight as a character that it spills over into the relatively spare narrative around him. King of Ashes’ plot has the feel of a novella but Cosby’s exposition never goes from A to B. He opts to get from Atlanta to Richmond by way of Chicago and fills in each gap along the way. Mostly, such time management is successful. 

Roman calls in his heavy merc friend, Khelil, but instead of going all A-Team on the BBB gang of J-Run, Roman (by way of Cosby) opts for the long game. The pacing is deliberate, with a mystery concerning the long-disappeared Carruthers matriarch simmering just below the surface. This is a slow burn and such simmering mostly works. The boiling point is a scalding one, too. But maybe what King of Ashes needed was a little A-Team jazz to break both Roman and Cosby out of a naval-gazing rut. Fortunately, Cosby knows when to stoke the flames.

Still, King of Ashes can feel like a heavy climb. The book trades the catharsis of Cosby’s earlier novels for something more brooding, almost punishing. There’s no redemption arc like Razorblade Tears, no searing sense of justice like All the Sinners Bleed. Even the surprise crossover – a quick but welcome two-page wink to Razorblade Tears – merely offers a fleeting sense of relief; a moment of brightness in an otherwise grim landscape.

S.A. Cosby’s writing remains sharp, his characters vivid, his sense of place unmatched. But King of Ashes doesn’t quite hit with the same resonance as his previous works. King of Ashes is intense, introspective, and compelling, but it also walks a razor’s edge between bleak and bleakness-for-its-own-sake. Fans of Cosby will appreciate the ambition and emotional depth here, but might find themselves longing for a bit more balance between the shadows and the light. Even if that light, as it has been stated, is where everything burns.