Blurb:

“Bug” Montage: honest mechanic, loving family man. He’s no longer the criminal he was – the sharpest wheelman east of the Mississippi.

But when his respectable life crumbles, a shady associate comes calling with a one-time job promising a huge payout. Inexorably drawn to the driver’s seat – and haunted by the ghost of his outlaw father – Bug is yanked back into a savage world of bullets and betrayal.

Like Breaking Bad in a high-speed collision with Drive, this dazzling novel holds up a cracked mirror to the American Dream – and tells the story of one man pushed to his limits by poverty, race and a self-destructive masculinity.

Review:

I’ve heard so many amazing things about Blacktop Wasteland since its publication in 2020, and I just had to see what all the fuss is about for myself. It was worth every second of the four year wait! SA Cosby is a phenomenal writer. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a crime writer who can go from tugging on my heartstrings to making my heart nearly beat out of my chest in a matter of pages with quite so much ease, and it meant I raced through this novel in a single day and struggled to put it down, even when I needed to eat!

Blacktop Wasteland is set in Virginia, USA. It’s not somewhere I’ve ever been, but SA Cosby’s descriptions are so vivid I could picture the surroundings and what was happening almost as if I was watching a film. I was taken into the story from the very first page and was completely immersed in it until the end.

The protagonist of Blacktop Wasteland is Beauregard Montage. It’s unusual in a crime novel to feel sympathy for the person involved in committing the crimes, but in this case, I absolutely did. SA Cosby does a brilliant job of building Beauregard’s character so the reader is fully aware of his background and his situation in the present that led to the events in the novel. There are some sections where the reader is taken back to 1991 and I enjoyed this brief glimpse into Beauregard’s past. Beauregard’s family life is also described in some detail – his wife and children are also characters for whom I felt a lot of sympathy.

Blacktop Wasteland is fast paced and full of adrenaline. SA Cosby has plotted this novel so well, keeping me on the edge of my seat at all times and throwing in a fair number of curveballs to keep me guessing what would happen next.

I can’t wait to see what else this author has in store for me!

Blacktop Wasteland is available from Amazon.