Date: September 27, 2025
Author: S.A. Cosby
Genre: Southern Noir, Crime Thriller, Suspense
I felt the writing was aimed at two very opposite ends of the reading spectrum. One end, eloquent prose, and the other, hoodspeak.
However, my issue wasn’t the dialogue, but with the descriptive analogies Mr. Cosby was using.
Let me set the scene, Roman flew home almost immediately when he found out his dad was in hospital due to a train to car accident. Roman reacted with first scheduling a flight then scheduling a naughty session with the local dominatrix before hitting the open air.
When he arrived home to his family house there was 25-year-old scotch under the sink still from when Roman was a kid, (so maybe 25 years?) Yet when Roman’s brother got home, as-per-usual, hammered, he started swilling from the bottle? What bothers me is what makes this night so special to the brother? It’s been sitting right there, ripe for the taking, for thousands of nights prior, just like this one with the brother in this same condition. Drunk.
The whopper to end them all was when in the same scene Roman was sitting at the table remembering his mom’s mysterious disappearance years ago. His gaze landed on the teddy bear cookie jar to which his dad used to say, when you bit into a cookie it was like ripping the head off the cookie jar. Then, Roman’s mind took that metaphor and began picturing his deceased mother in a shallow grave, with no head.
The family business was the local crematorium, and recent developments revealed the dad was at risk from the local hoodlums. I wonder where the dispute arose from. Was the dad being hassled by the local bad guys in an effort to force him to dispose of their corpses? Since he had the crematorium and all?
I didn’t read much farther and now I shall never know.