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2024 reads, #69. A freelance client of mine, a black man who writes crime thrillers heavily informed by race, recently had a chance to professionally interact with SA Cosby, a fellow black man who writes crime thrillers heavily informed by race; and he had so many amazing things to say about Cosby’s work that I decided to do a completist run of all four of his novels myself. As usual in these situations, I’ve decided to take them in chronological publishing order, which has me starting out with his 2019 debut My Darkest Prayer, originally published on a tiny basement press before Cosby’s career made a huge turn towards the mainstream with his next book after it, 2020’s Blacktop Wasteland. That makes this book a particularly interesting one to start with, because I think it will be fascinating to see how his books change once he moved from a situation with no budget and barely any staff to eventually the mainstream publisher Macmillan (through their imprint Flatiron Books, known for publishing a relatively small amount of titles annually but putting massive amounts of marketing support behind each).

Certainly one thing you can say is that the book is pretty atrociously edited for an author who’s gone on to be on the NYT bestseller list, with the basement press that published it seeming to have done what a lot of basement presses do in these situations, just run it once through Grammarly and then call it a day, without bothering to do any work on the manuscript’s sentence usage or paragraph structure. That leads to a book where technically all the words are spelled right but is still a frustrating reading experience, mainly because Cosby on his own seems to follow the old childhood English class rule that you always start a piece of dialogue as the beginning of its own paragraph no matter what else is going on in the story, leading to this halting and sputtering reading experience where Character A will say something, Character B will start doing something in the same paragraph, then we jump to an entire new paragraph when Character B says something while they’re doing the thing described in the previous paragraph, with Character A now doing something new themselves at the end of Character B’s paragraph, and Cosby now jumping to a new paragraph halfway through their action once again, in order to tell us what Character A said while he was doing the actions described in the previous paragraph.

That’s not a big deal, but certainly something that drove me a little crazy; and while that could’ve been made up for by a truly fascinating storyline, here in his debut Cosby gives us only a by-the-books noir tale, in which a disgraced former cop who now works at a funeral home is pulled against his will into the mystery behind who killed a corrupt evangelical preacher who was a con artist and drug dealer before “seeing the light,� and (it becomes quickly clear) didn’t exactly stop the sinning after being ordained. (Basically, every plot development you guess in advance is going to happen ends up actually happening, exactly the way you guessed it.) No, the real saving grace here, and what I clearly think made early readers fans despite the middling nature of the prose and the plot, is that Cosby has one of the most perfect ears for dialogue of any contemporary writer I’ve ever read, particularly impressive here because of not only setting the story in a small Southern town, but within the black community of that small Southern town, putting these incredibly slang-heavy phrases in the mouths of these characters that sound like he had just been hanging out at the local barbershop last week with his tape recorder on. (Here’s just one example, which I snapped with my camera when I came across it so I wouldn’t forget it: “Nah, homie, Fella ain’t no real crook, son. He a shook one. Shit, he so pussy he meows when he walk.�)

All this added together would normally get the book three and a half stars from me; but I’m happy to round up in this case here at the no-half-star Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, because that’s exactly how I feel about this book, on the excited side of “mehâ€� instead of the disappointed side. For sure I’m now excited about reading his next book, 2020’s Blacktop Wasteland, which is when he finally got a decent editor and a large marketing budget, with the huge jump in prestige and popularity those assets bring with them. (The book either won or was a finalist for almost a dozen literary awards, including being named Thriller of the Year by the Los Angeles Times.) I may sneak in an unrelated book or two before that, but I’ll absolutely be getting to that next novel soon, hopefully before the calendar year is over, so I hope you’ll keep an eye out for that writeup sometime in the next month.