Razorblade Tears
by S.A. Cosby
Ike Randolph has spent fifteen years building a quiet life far away from his criminal past. He runs a lawn care business. He stays out of trouble. He doesn’t talk much about his son Isiah, who married a white man named Derek, or how that marriage has mostly just been a source of distance between them. Then two cops show up at his door. Isiah and Derek are dead, shot in their home, leaving behind a three-year-old daughter and two fathers who each have to live with never having made things right. Derek’s father Buddy Lee is a drunk ex-con with underworld contacts and nothing left to lose. He wants to know who did it. Ike does too. So they go looking.
“You don’t stop loving your child. Even when you fail them.”
What It Actually Felt Like
One of the best books I’ve read this year.
The premise sounds like a setup for a straightforward revenge thriller, and on the surface that’s what it delivers. Two fathers. One murder. A body count that climbs. But what Cosby is actually doing underneath all of it is slower and harder and more specific than a revenge plot has any right to be.
Both men failed their sons. That’s the ground this book is built on. Ike didn’t reject Isiah loudly or cruelly, he just went quiet and stayed there, let the distance accumulate, told himself there was still time. Buddy Lee was louder about it. More drunk about it. More obviously a mess. But the result was the same: their sons died without their fathers having fully shown up for who they were. The violence Ike and Buddy Lee enact on the people who killed their boys is also, unmistakably, violence aimed at themselves. At the years they can’t get back.
Cosby writes the Southern landscape like someone who actually lives in it and has complicated feelings about it. Confederate flags appear without comment in the background. The racism and homophobia aren’t explained or historicized for the reader, they’re just present the way they’re present in real life, which is everywhere and unremarkable until they’re suddenly lethal. The friendship that develops between Ike and Buddy Lee is earned slowly and feels genuinely unexpected to both of them. Two men who have every reason to write each other off finding something they recognize in each other’s grief.
The final act is devastating in the specific way that Cosby earns. By the time we get there, I had stopped thinking of this as a thriller and started thinking of it as a story about what it costs to be a certain kind of man, and what gets left behind.
The Honest Part
The violence is graphic in a way that is on purpose and sometimes pushed past where I needed it to go. Some of it is cathartic. Some of it tips into spectacle. It’s worth knowing that going in, because the emotional weight of the book is real and you don’t want to bounce off the gore before you get to the part that matters.
Who This Is For
Anyone who needs a crime novel to also be doing something. This is for readers who want action and blood and also want to cry a little. If you have complicated grief about a parent-child relationship where time ran out before things got resolved, Cosby is going to find the bruise and press on it specifically.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ One of my favorites. Beautiful message, beautiful story.
Tags thriller, crime, Southern noir, Black authors, grief, mood: cinematic and emotional
