![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
All The Sinners Bleed - S.A. Crosby
I really loved the first two of his books I've read (Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears - especially the first one, which is a really killer crime/heist/noir). This one, though ... it was just mediocre. Mostly it felt like he had a lot that he wanted to say - about race and law enforcement and the modern South - and the book was a vehicle for that, but the actual plot kinda ... wasn't what it should have been, I guess?
The basic plot: the first Black sheriff in a small, economically depressed, oppressively racist Virginia town and his crew respond to a school shooting that turns out to be a cover for something worse. (TBH, any trigger warning you can imagine for this book probably applies. The school shooting is the least of it.) It was a slow-paced book that meandered a lot, and spent a *lot* of time dwelling on the everyday minutiae of a murder investigation in a small town and the everyday life of the protagonist, and the problem is, a lot of this just wasn't that interesting. A book like that needs to be carried by the characters, and I did like the protagonist and his dad, but apart from them, there were a tremendous number of mostly interchangeable characters. Which isn't a problem Crosby normally has! The characters in his previous books were very sharply drawn and very there, and I just wasn't feeling that here. I couldn't even tell most of the deputies apart, aside from the lone woman and one with a particularly distinctive name and backstory. And the mystery just kind of - wasn't very good. The first half of the book is absolutely glacial, and once it starts to develop the murder mystery in the back half, clues are resolved almost as soon as they arrive, or else (my least favorite mystery trick of all time) the author just doesn't tell us; we know he read an email, we know there was something important in it that he reacted to, but we don't find out 'til later what it was.
There's a good example of this with a subplot that dropped into the middle of the book in which Titus, the protagonist, finds out one of his deputies is on the take and is passing information about investigations to criminals in the town. This could have been a really fascinating "who can we trust?" subplot if it had been threaded through the rest of the murder investigation. Instead, it shows up out of nowhere, he finds out who it is a chapter later (but we're not told immediately; this was one of the parts where he reads something we're not allowed to see) and then that subplot is resolved a couple of scenes later but it doesn't really have much impact since the deputies are mostly interchangeable anyway.
I liked a lot of individual things in the book. Titus is an interesting character (although unfortunately the book's slow pace means we spend a whole lot of time stuck with Titus's depression and self-loathing; he was a lot more enjoyable when he was Doing Things). As always in Crosby's books, the setting - a small Virginia town whose main industries are crab fishing and the local American-flag factory, wrestling with its racist past and present - is incredibly vivid and believable, a fully realized character itself. There is a ton going on in this book, a lot of interesting musings about race and morality and trying to be a good person in a flawed world.
But it just doesn't come together into a whole that I liked in particular. The mystery is plodding and predictable, with most of its twists either blatantly telegraphed, or fairly pointless considering how interchangeable the characters are. We spend a ton of time on everyday details of the investigation, characters having dinner and going to church and leading their ordinary lives, all of which really has to be carried on the strength of the characters - and this book just didn't have it. His girlfriend's a bland cypher; the deputies and suspects are largely interchangeable and undeveloped; his estranged brother has next to no personality either, so it's hard to care about whether or not they reconcile. There are a handful of background characters who do emerge as vivid individuals (the firebrand Black agitator who is a persistent thorn in the side of Titus's department, the aging hippie who moved to a rural island full of cultists, Titus's hotheaded podcaster ex-girlfriend who is approximately 1000x more interesting than his current one) but nobody in this book is going to stick with me past closing the final page.
Bigger spoilers follow ...
I also simply ended up resenting how poorly choreographed the mystery was. By the time I was nearing the end I was pretty sure the culprit would turn out to be some rando we'd barely met or knew anything about (if not a completely new character never previously mentioned), and I wasn't wrong. Like, at least throw a hint at us about the guy having a secret life, something strange about his house, wearing a wig (the wig fibers are a recurring clue, but we don't even know he wears one, so what's the point?) ... basically anything! Instead - much like the subplot with the corrupt deputy - it's just a case of "Oh, it's that guy, I guess."
And a lot of the drama of the back half of the book simply felt underbaked. There is a *lot* going on personally with Titus in this book: his estrangement from his brother, the tragic not-exactly-a-mystery of why he left the FBI, his grief over his mother's horrible death, his never-ending tug-of-war about how to deal with his law enforcement career vs being the person he wants to be, his unraveling relationship with the girlfriend he rarely thinks about. It's all resolved by the end, but in a way that almost felt like ticking off boxes on a plot outline. There were some scenes that hit right (the moment when he finally cries over his mom; his triumphant realization that once he's resigned from the sheriff's office, he finally *can* do something about that Confederate statue downtown) but on the whole it all felt like it could've used another edit to tighten things up and connected the dots more.
Honestly ... I felt like this book needed multiple main POVs. This is what Crosby's previous books had, and it often feels like we're following the least interesting plot track, or possibly the one that Crosby is least interested in. I think it would have helped tremendously if, for example, Titus's brother or one of his love interests or antagonists had played a bigger role in POV and plot. It would have been interesting to see a chunk of the plot unfolding from the POV of the podcaster lady or the anti-authority agitators or the corrupt deputy who's trying to hide his activities from Titus or even one of the town's racist rednecks ... I felt like it's possible that following one character in single POV really isn't playing to Crosby's strengths as a writer and a lot of of my complaints about this book, relative to his earlier books, are just because following Titus around for chapter after chapter while he does upright moral things and fights off depression simply wasn't as interesting as the whiplash POV ricochet between good characters, neutral and bad ones that we got in Crosby's previous books.
(Although, seriously, the mystery just was not very good.)
So that's a whole lot of complaining, but honestly, even a mediocre Crosby book is still definitely worth reading. I enjoyed it, I liked or at least was interested in a lot of what it had to say, and it's a vivid picture of a town with some fascinating scenes (the island full of religious cultists was a great location just for sheer vivid setting, even if it also became extremely obvious right away that of the various churches they were checking out at that point in the book, this was the plot-relevant one because it was 100% more interesting than any of the others). Not a book I see myself coming back to, but it kept me reading, especially in the back half.
The basic plot: the first Black sheriff in a small, economically depressed, oppressively racist Virginia town and his crew respond to a school shooting that turns out to be a cover for something worse. (TBH, any trigger warning you can imagine for this book probably applies. The school shooting is the least of it.) It was a slow-paced book that meandered a lot, and spent a *lot* of time dwelling on the everyday minutiae of a murder investigation in a small town and the everyday life of the protagonist, and the problem is, a lot of this just wasn't that interesting. A book like that needs to be carried by the characters, and I did like the protagonist and his dad, but apart from them, there were a tremendous number of mostly interchangeable characters. Which isn't a problem Crosby normally has! The characters in his previous books were very sharply drawn and very there, and I just wasn't feeling that here. I couldn't even tell most of the deputies apart, aside from the lone woman and one with a particularly distinctive name and backstory. And the mystery just kind of - wasn't very good. The first half of the book is absolutely glacial, and once it starts to develop the murder mystery in the back half, clues are resolved almost as soon as they arrive, or else (my least favorite mystery trick of all time) the author just doesn't tell us; we know he read an email, we know there was something important in it that he reacted to, but we don't find out 'til later what it was.
There's a good example of this with a subplot that dropped into the middle of the book in which Titus, the protagonist, finds out one of his deputies is on the take and is passing information about investigations to criminals in the town. This could have been a really fascinating "who can we trust?" subplot if it had been threaded through the rest of the murder investigation. Instead, it shows up out of nowhere, he finds out who it is a chapter later (but we're not told immediately; this was one of the parts where he reads something we're not allowed to see) and then that subplot is resolved a couple of scenes later but it doesn't really have much impact since the deputies are mostly interchangeable anyway.
I liked a lot of individual things in the book. Titus is an interesting character (although unfortunately the book's slow pace means we spend a whole lot of time stuck with Titus's depression and self-loathing; he was a lot more enjoyable when he was Doing Things). As always in Crosby's books, the setting - a small Virginia town whose main industries are crab fishing and the local American-flag factory, wrestling with its racist past and present - is incredibly vivid and believable, a fully realized character itself. There is a ton going on in this book, a lot of interesting musings about race and morality and trying to be a good person in a flawed world.
But it just doesn't come together into a whole that I liked in particular. The mystery is plodding and predictable, with most of its twists either blatantly telegraphed, or fairly pointless considering how interchangeable the characters are. We spend a ton of time on everyday details of the investigation, characters having dinner and going to church and leading their ordinary lives, all of which really has to be carried on the strength of the characters - and this book just didn't have it. His girlfriend's a bland cypher; the deputies and suspects are largely interchangeable and undeveloped; his estranged brother has next to no personality either, so it's hard to care about whether or not they reconcile. There are a handful of background characters who do emerge as vivid individuals (the firebrand Black agitator who is a persistent thorn in the side of Titus's department, the aging hippie who moved to a rural island full of cultists, Titus's hotheaded podcaster ex-girlfriend who is approximately 1000x more interesting than his current one) but nobody in this book is going to stick with me past closing the final page.
Bigger spoilers follow ...
I also simply ended up resenting how poorly choreographed the mystery was. By the time I was nearing the end I was pretty sure the culprit would turn out to be some rando we'd barely met or knew anything about (if not a completely new character never previously mentioned), and I wasn't wrong. Like, at least throw a hint at us about the guy having a secret life, something strange about his house, wearing a wig (the wig fibers are a recurring clue, but we don't even know he wears one, so what's the point?) ... basically anything! Instead - much like the subplot with the corrupt deputy - it's just a case of "Oh, it's that guy, I guess."
And a lot of the drama of the back half of the book simply felt underbaked. There is a *lot* going on personally with Titus in this book: his estrangement from his brother, the tragic not-exactly-a-mystery of why he left the FBI, his grief over his mother's horrible death, his never-ending tug-of-war about how to deal with his law enforcement career vs being the person he wants to be, his unraveling relationship with the girlfriend he rarely thinks about. It's all resolved by the end, but in a way that almost felt like ticking off boxes on a plot outline. There were some scenes that hit right (the moment when he finally cries over his mom; his triumphant realization that once he's resigned from the sheriff's office, he finally *can* do something about that Confederate statue downtown) but on the whole it all felt like it could've used another edit to tighten things up and connected the dots more.
Honestly ... I felt like this book needed multiple main POVs. This is what Crosby's previous books had, and it often feels like we're following the least interesting plot track, or possibly the one that Crosby is least interested in. I think it would have helped tremendously if, for example, Titus's brother or one of his love interests or antagonists had played a bigger role in POV and plot. It would have been interesting to see a chunk of the plot unfolding from the POV of the podcaster lady or the anti-authority agitators or the corrupt deputy who's trying to hide his activities from Titus or even one of the town's racist rednecks ... I felt like it's possible that following one character in single POV really isn't playing to Crosby's strengths as a writer and a lot of of my complaints about this book, relative to his earlier books, are just because following Titus around for chapter after chapter while he does upright moral things and fights off depression simply wasn't as interesting as the whiplash POV ricochet between good characters, neutral and bad ones that we got in Crosby's previous books.
(Although, seriously, the mystery just was not very good.)
So that's a whole lot of complaining, but honestly, even a mediocre Crosby book is still definitely worth reading. I enjoyed it, I liked or at least was interested in a lot of what it had to say, and it's a vivid picture of a town with some fascinating scenes (the island full of religious cultists was a great location just for sheer vivid setting, even if it also became extremely obvious right away that of the various churches they were checking out at that point in the book, this was the plot-relevant one because it was 100% more interesting than any of the others). Not a book I see myself coming back to, but it kept me reading, especially in the back half.
no subject
I hate this so much, and EVEN WORSE, I recently watched a horror movie where two characters have a plot-significant conversation off screen and we NEVER find out what they said. All we know is that two characters have known something all along, and one of them is just now sharing it with the third person, and it makes him feel like he "can't leave" the haunted house. And what was it? NO ONE KNOWS. OMFG. (It's possible it comes up in the sequels, which I've heard are much less minimalist, but I haven't gotten that far.)
Anyway! Yes, annoying! It's the reason I stopped reading Five Red Herrings and as a consequence never read any more Dorothy Sayers, ever.
no subject
But yeah, it's a narrative trick I simply hate; it's just such cheap trickery for the purposes of temporary suspense.
I do really appreciate authors who can not tell us stuff while seemingly telling us everything; that is some deft word handling indeed. But this was just the most basic "His eyebrows went up as he read the shocking DNA results" [plot moves on], and the really frustrating thing is that the actual mysteriousness of the mystery isn't even really that central to the book! I'm glad that I started out with better Crosby novels than this one, because this is very far from his best.
no subject
So: DO NOT judge Sayers by that book! Absolutely her worst book, hands down, I don't know what she was trying to do but it FAILED! If you're going to try a one-off just to see I recommend The Nine Tailors,
no subject
oh hey this is also MY least favourite mystery plot device of all time.
no subject