Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner * New York Times Notable Book * NPR’s Best Books of the Year * BookPage’s #1 Mystery and Suspense of the Year * Sun Sentinel’s #1 Best Mystery of the Year “I loved Blacktop Wasteland…[A] fast-paced, bareknuckle thriller.” -Stephen King “A roaring, full-throttle thriller, crackling with tension and charm.” -The New York Times Book Review “One of the year’s … with tension and charm.” –The New York Times Book Review
“One of the year’s strongest novels.” -Sun Sentinel
A husband, a father, a son, a business owner…And the best getaway driver east of the Mississippi.
Beauregard “Bug” Montage is an honest mechanic, a loving husband, and a hard-working dad. Bug knows there’s no future in the man he used to be: known from the hills of North Carolina to the beaches of Florida as the best wheelman on the East Coast.
He thought he’d left all that behind him, but as his carefully built new life begins to crumble, he finds himself drawn inexorably back into a world of blood and bullets. When a smooth-talking former associate comes calling with a can’t-miss jewelry store heist, Bug feels he has no choice but to get back in the driver’s seat. And Bug is at his best where the scent of gasoline mixes with the smell of fear.
Haunted by the ghost of who he used to be and the father who disappeared when he needed him most, Bug must find a way to navigate this blacktop wasteland…or die trying.
Like Ocean’s Eleven meets Drive, with a Southern noir twist, S. A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland is a searing, operatic story of a man pushed to his limits by poverty, race, and his own former life of crime.
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Cracking crime fiction, the kind of book I didn’t think they published anymore.
Classic heist/getaway driver story, deeply anchored in poverty and race and multigenerational trauma. Highly recommended. This book had me so tense by the halfway point that I could only read about ten pages at a time before I had to take a break, do some deep breathing to calm down. I hope someone has optioned this for film. It’d be AMAZING. SA Cosby is a brilliant writer, just relentlessly ratcheting up the tension while never letting go of the question, “Can you escape the past?” Your own, your parents’, your community’s. Blacktop Wasteland is one of my best reads of the year.
Loved this. Powerful nuanced characters. Great story line. A new perspective, for me, on racism.
First I wanted to thank you for the opportunity to read this book early.
So I give it a 2.5. I went with 3 because I feel like this just wasn’t the book for me. I, personally, found it hard to want to read for the most part. I think others would enjoy the gangster side and the crazy illegal side jobs. But this type of story doesn’t interest me, I’m not into stories about fast cars, gang banging, and drugs.
The action was really good in this book though. When the one guy from the jewelery store gets shot, and Bug ends up knowing from when his car was broke down. I couldn’t believe that Bug’s son got shot either. The only thing I strongly disliked was that it didn’t necessarily have a happy ending.
So in conclusion the actual thriller part of the book was pretty good, the filler I wasn’t very interesting.
This is my honest and true opinion.
Fast and Furious mashed up with the Ocean’s franchise. Heart pounding suspense wrapped up in the reality of black America. Such a good story, the ending leaves you wanting more Bug, so hopefully a sequel is coming.
Whoa, this book had great potential for being one of those everlasting books—at least for me anyway–like the masters; Chandler, Mosley, MacDonald. Three stars when it could easily have been five. This was a nice comfortable read and I would recommend it to anyone. This is not a mystery or thriller but a well-executed and straightforward crime novel. We know the players, we know what’s at risk—the motivation. And to some degree the reader jumps into the story and is carried along. Voice is the big Kahuna in writing and voice is here, but sometimes gets lost in the mix (see comments below), when it could have been extremely powerful.
I might be in the minority because of an editorial eye I can’t shut off. The abundance of similes, the weasel words and the shifting from third close point of view to third distant, to entirely different points of view, kept me at arms distance from this one, kept me from dropping into the Fictive Dream. There are some glorious similes here but the power they wield is diminished by the sheer number, sometimes three and four on a page (also mixed in with metaphors). And some of the lesser similes are clunkers and give the text a feeling of trying too hard. Same with some of the word choices. Great words but out of place in the rest of the sentence which is more plain-speak.
I enjoyed the book and will definitely pick up the author’s next one.