Book review: King of Ashes by SA Cosby

In a recent review, I talked about how fictional secrets ought, if possible, to be kept rationally and meaningfully, but that often this isn’t the case. The ‘but’ you might be hoping for won’t come. Because King of Ashes is another book that makes a pointlessly kept secret vital to its plot, only in this instance the two plot twists that depend upon it are both fairly predictable, so Cosby really does shoot his book in the foot unnecessarily. Which is a shame, because there was scope for this novel, like Cosby’s previous works of Southern noir, to be quite good fun.

Roman Carruthers is a high-powered money-manager to the moderately famous, who is called back to his home town – a preposterously crime-addled two-bit city by the name of Jefferson Run (nicknamed ‘Jefferson’s got the runs’ because the inhabitants seem to possess the wit and inventiveness of a scatologically minded six year old) – after his father is run off the road and put into a coma in suspicious circumstances. We soon discover that Roman’s brother, Dante, has spectacularly bodged a drug deal and got the family indebted to the bloodthirsty mobsters who control the city, so that only by eradicating his brother’s creditors can Roman, with Dante, and their sister Neveah, ever be free from danger. Cue Roman turning on the salesman’s charm, turning off any scruples he might have possessed about illegality, and calling in his very useful buddy Khalil, a soldier-turned-mercenary-turned-private-security-maestro-turned-fixer-of-any-problems-requiring-an-especially-violent-solution (I know, I want one of those too).

It’s not a bad premise and there is, as ever with Cosby, some nicely executed and effectively violent set-pieces, and a plot that moves rapidly enough to keep you reading despite the flaws. Unfortunately, however, it’s not just the dumb secret that holds the novel back from what it might have been. I complained when reviewing All The Sinners Bleed about Cosby’s lack of talent for the simile, but in King of Ashes the absurd grandiloquence of his phrasing becomes unbearable: ‘A die has been cast and a Rubicon has been crossed that will cast a shadow over their lives that will never lift, never cease, a blackness that will envelop them all like the cold embrace of an endless night.’ I mean, good grief. Now imagine a bookful of those.

Ultimately, King of Ashes overworks both its language and the trope of hero and villain being much less different than they assume, while propping it all up on unnecessary cloaks and daggers. So, unlike All The Sinners Bleed, the faults really do outweigh the fun in this one.