‘Blacktop Wasteland’
by S.A. Cosby
In The Spotlight

‘BLACKTOP WASTELAND’ by S.A. COSBY

Thanks to the lovely Claire, representing Flatiron Books for the invitation to take part in the promotion of this book and to the great team at NetGalley for their ever speedy download service.

There is no official promotional tour banner for this book, nor is there extract or author content available, however the amazing ratings and reviews this book has attracted so far across several sites, speak volumes, as does the powerful premise.

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‘BLACKTOP WASTELAND‘

IT’S A CRIME THAT HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF.

Beauregard “Bug” Montage: husband, father, honest car mechanic. But he was once known – from North Carolina to the beaches of Florida – as the best getaway driver on the East Coast. Just like his father, who disappeared many years ago.

After a series of financial calamities (worsened by the racial prejudices of the small town he lives in) Bug reluctantly takes part in a daring diamond heist to solve his money troubles – and to go straight once and for all. However, when it goes horrifically wrong, he’s sucked into a grimy underworld which threatens everything, and everyone, he holds dear . . .

From a stunning new voice in fiction, BLACKTOP WASTELAND is a dazzling, operatic crime novel that holds up a cracked mirror to the American dream.

With breakneck twists, heart-breaking intents and the missteps of its indelible characters, S.A. Cosby weaves a story about black male identity, about what it means to be from the South and have its history not include your story, and about the pull of family and its confusing messages about love and inheritance.

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MEET – BEAUREGARD ‘BUG‘ MONTAGE

Beauregard Montage knows how to fix any car — but that would be selling him short. He knows how to make an ordinary American car something that flies, something that, under his hands on the wheel, can take its driver places. He came to that knowledge through heritage, love and the lure of dangerous getaways.

But he is in a town that has no call for those skills.

He’s got a repair shop that is floundering, a wife and two sons, a daughter from an earlier time, and the car he inherited from his father, a Plymouth Duster.

Late at night, when he races the car ten miles out from the fairgrounds in the back road illegal races, he feels most like himself. He feels reconnected to the part of him that has no part in this other life he knows he needs to live for the people he loves.

It’s always there though, just below the surface, that desire for one more getaway drive, one more adrenaline boosting race against the cops.

So as his respectable life begins to crumble, a shady associate comes calling with a clean, one-time job: a diamond heist promising a get-rich pay-out. 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, which soon endangers all he holds dear…

This stunning novel holds up a cracked mirror to the woozy ideals of the American dream – a dazzling, operatic story of a man pushed to his limits by poverty, race and a scarred, self-destructive masculinity.

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S.A. COSBY

Shawn A. Cosby is a writer from Southeastern Virginia, who majored in English at Christopher Newport University and now resides in Gloucester, Virginia.

His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. His short story The Grass Beneath My Feet won the Anthony award for best short story in 2019. He is also the author of My Darkest Prayer and Brotherhood of the Blade.

His writing is influenced by his experiences as a bouncer, construction worker, retail manager and for six hours a mascot for a major fast food chain inside the world’s hottest costume.

When Shawn isn’t crafting tales of murder and mayhem, he assists the dedicated staff at J.K. Redmond Funeral home, as a mortician’s assistant.

He is an avid hiker and is also known as one hell of a chess player.

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