A Black sheriff. A serial killer. A small town ready to combust.
Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, Charon has had only two murders. After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface.
Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. Those festering secrets are now out in the open and ready to tear the town apart.
As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon. With the killer’s possible connections to a local church and the town’s harrowing history weighing on him, Titus projects confidence about closing the case while concealing a painful secret from his own past. At the same time, he also must contend with a far-right group that wants to hold a parade in celebration of the town’s Confederate history.
Powerful and unforgettable, All the Sinners Bleed confirms S. A. Cosby as “one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-you-by-both-ears voices in American crime fiction” (The
Washington Post).
QUOTE: “Terrible people can do good things sometimes. But they like doing the terrible things more.”
Angela’s Summary
This one fits under the scope of small-town mystery thriller. Charon is a small southern town with plenty of issues — the primary one being racism, but Crosby also touches on gay men passing for straight, the illegitimate child of an interracial relationship, backwoods snake-handling Jesus-shouters. None of these distractors take over the story, though, as Crosby keeps his eye firmly on Titus and the town of Charon. Of Charon, Crosby says “no place was more confused by its past or more terrified of the future than the South.” That’s the perspective that lifts this novel, and I Iike that it comes late in the novel, when the case Cosby is trying to make has been well laid out.
All the Sinners Bleed is rough, smart, gritty, and Southern to the core. Cosby spends a lot of time making sure we feel empathy for his characters and understand the historical context of everything that happens in Charon. This is a story about a town in transition and a sheriff from a small town trying to use everything he learned while working as an FBI agent to track down a serial killer in a place that lacks the resources and technology of a big city. It’s also a novel, however, that deals with religious zealots railing against “gay marriage, the liberal agenda, and how all lives matter.” This is a novel that acts like a mirror. Charon County is a mellow place on the surface, but right underneath that there is a lot of hate, racism, and what Titus calls “putrefaction of the soul.” That makes Charon County a place we can find across the country, and that is what makes this an important book in 2024.