KING OF ASHES

Deadly trouble awaits Roman Carruthers in his corrupt hometown when the Black wealth management whiz attempts to outwit a murderous drug gang threatening his family.

The Atlanta-based Roman’s weak-willed, strung out younger brother, Dante, and an ill-fated crony have incurred a sizable drug debt by consuming rather than dealing most of the Molly and heroin they obtained from the notorious Black Baron Boys. Led by the ruthless Torrent and his cooler-tempered sibling, Tranquil, the BBB have expressed their displeasure with Dante by running his father, founder of a family-run crematorium, off the road, leaving him in a coma. Having never encountered a situation he couldn’t wheel and deal his way out of, the self-regarding Roman offers to cover the debt and much more by reinvesting the BBB’s money. Their immediate answer is to knock his teeth out. But with visions of using the crematorium (Dante’s inferno?) to burn up their victims, they go along with him—to a point. Roman, like his brother and sister, Neveah, is haunted by the disappearance of their mother when they were teens. To expiate his pain, he visits a dominatrix while Neveah—who increasingly believes rumors that her jealous father did her mother in—sleeps with a crooked cop. In making the transition from slick operator to cold-blooded instigator of violence himself, Roman becomes the latest in a long line of fictional Southerners to strike a deal with the devil (as in the film Sinners, fire plays a big role). The plot sometimes wobbles—Roman pursues an unlikely romance with Torrent’s smart and warmly appealing half sister. But Cosby keeps things tense, making great use of the crematorium and freshening the genre with lofty philosophizing: “To Roman, it felt like life, existence, was a stygian wheel that had spun on a bitter axis.” Rarely has a crime fiction family been given a more bitter spin than this one.

Another strong outing by a modern noir master.