A Novel
All the Sinners Bleed is a gripping crime thriller by S. A. Cosby. Set in rural Virginia, it follows Afton 'Tennessee' Mozell as she investigates a brutal murder and uncovers a web of corruption and secrets.
A year after Titus Crown won his surprise election bid for Charon County Sheriff – becoming the first Black sheriff in the county’s history – he and his team respond to an active-shooter situation at a local high school. As the sheriff and his team move to enter the school, the shooter emerges, carrying a rifle and a leather mask. Titus realizes it’s Latrell Macdonald – a young Black man.
Latrell says things like, “You don’t know the things I’ve done. I tried to stop, and they said they’d kill my little brother.” Titus tells his deputies to stand down and urges Latrell to set down the gun. Latrell raises the gun above his head and runs down the school steps toward the deputies. Two of them – both white men – shoot and kill him.
They discover Latrell has shot Jeff Spearman, a white man and a well-loved teacher at the school. But Titus can’t shake Latrell’s last words, and wonders if Spearman was somehow implicated in Latrell’s comments about his brother.
Soon after, Jamal Addison, a Black pastor, confronts Titus about the incident. The pastor wants an external investigation of the police shooting. He doesn’t think Titus is doing enough as a fellow person of color.
Determined to get to the bottom of the case, Titus brings a team to investigate Spearman’s house. There, Titus finds a leather wolf mask like the one Latrell had carried, two external hard drives, and a painting of a willow tree labeled The Secret Garden. Titus thinks the willow tree looks eerily familiar.
The hard drives contain photos and videos of Spearman, Latrell, and another, unidentifiable man, all wearing wolf masks and performing unspeakable acts on countless youths. Through the video, it’s clear the trio has killed at least seven young children.
Titus knows many Charon County citizens will struggle when the truth of Spearman’s activities is revealed. Already, he’s had to deal with receiving congratulations from white men around town for “putting down” Latrell, as they term it. His own deputies, before seeing the photographic evidence, didn’t believe Spearman could have done anything to provoke Latrell’s actions.
Titus soon comes to the realization that the willow tree he recognized from Spearman’s painting is on a local landowner’s property. When they investigate, they find the remains of seven bodies in the field around the tree.
ANALYSIS
The first quarter of All the Sinners Bleed explores identity and belonging. Titus lives “in a no-man’s-land between people who believed in him, people who hated him because of his skin color, and people who believed he was a traitor to his race.” Especially when he deals with a white man congratulating him on killing Latrell, a Black youth, or with a Black pastor expecting certain behavior from him because he’s also Black, Titus struggles with his actual and perceived identities.
Everyone has an idea of how others should act, and everyone has a narrative about who they think others are based on their social position and skin color. But not everyone is as they appear to be. While publicly Jeff Spearman appeared to be an upstanding citizen, he was actually a racist pedophile and murderer. And this is only the first of many twists and turns to come.
All the Sinners Bleed (2023) is a work of crime fiction, focused on main character Titus Crown’s efforts to investigate several recent killings in his hometown. To solve the crime, Crown must contend with the town’s racist history, a far-right group, and a long-undiscovered serial killer.
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