My Darkest Prayer: A Novel

Hi, I bought this with BLACKTOP WASTELAND, which I shall review later. The hero is a kind of black Jack Reacher, acting a little more on the dark side. A very good read. Academics who might feel guilty reading a thriller and not high-end literature might console themselves that there is BLM content ... ---

What a great debut. Cosby weaves together race, religion, funeral homes, gangsters and small towns together in a fresh take in this modern noir tale. Unexpectedly, Cosby uses dark humour to lighten up the tone when needed. Whether situational or just some great dialogue exchanges, I found these moments great and deftly used. The characters are great, and I hope we get to read more about Waymaker, Skunk, Shade and even Victor. As for the meat of the book, it is a feast. The only thing that stops me from giving it 5 Stars, is the quality of the Kindle edition. I found typos and hyperlinks, which might seem minor, but disrupts the readability for me.

S.A. Cosby is one talented writer, his Blacktop Wasteland was one of the best books I read in 2021 so I started My Darkest Prayer with high hopes. It is a very good book filled with a lot of energy and quality writing, maybe not as good as Blacktop but for a first novel that is to be expected. Nathan Waymaker works at a funeral directors and is a former cop and marine. He has issues stemming from the death of his parents and the resulting memories of the actions taken to hold the person responsible to account. He is asked to investigate the purported suicide of a beloved local minister and that is where his nightmare begins. If there was anything I didn't like about the book it would be the continual flow of women who Nathan has slept with, everywhere he turns he is meeting a former flame, it just felt a bit too much of a good thing. Definitely a solid addition to one's crime library.

This author lends a natural pace to his stories. He lends humanity to his characters.

2.5 Stars Nathan Waymaker handles the bodies. He is an ex-marine, ex-cop working at a local funeral home and he does the heavy lifting of handling the bodies. When a local preacher is found dead, Nathan is approached to dig a bit deeper. Suicide doesn’t seem right and the parishioners want Nathan to leverage his skills and less than amicable relationships with local law enforcement to see what he can find. This sets us on a trail of action, intrigue and mystery that makes for an interesting enough storyline. There were a couple of things about this book that I really liked. Like I read the bits, closed the book and exclaimed probably with a couple choice curse words how much I liked them. There is a bit about “Fools and Flies” early in the book that really struck me. Another excellent quote from the book is: “I don’t think there is anything more emblematic of the damaged American psyche than a poor white kid insulting a poor black kid for being poor.” I mean that is some good stuff, right? Then on page 51 Nathan gives us his four word philosophy on how to deal with the racists and bullies of this world “Talk s%$#. Spit blood.” I was in love with that quote. I want to dwell on this a bit longer, because the entire half page of lead up to this line was awesome. It talked about how whooping a bully had not made the bully a better person, but a better as$!@$%. The bully hadn’t learned humility, he had learned subtlety. Again, I LOVED these parts, all little bits of magic kind of outside the main story. Nathan is a bad ass, and I get all the ex-military “He is highly trained in hand to hand combat” stuff. However, he walks through a couple 4 on 1 fights and other situations that came off as a bit unrealistic. We know Nathan’s parents were killed. We know that local law enforcement handled it poorly. We know that he holds a grudge and has sought some level of revenge. For me that wasn’t really squared, I got the feeling it was a “killed by drunk driving” situation, later it mentioned murder. We know the perpetrator was an affluent white man. There really isn’t a clear explanation of what happened there. You get the feeling that a white man got off for his parent’s death but it wasn’t really malicious?, and then maybe it was malicious? I don’t really know, but it felt loose to me, because you really needed to know what happened to square Nathan’s level of vengeance. (This is all outside of the main storyline, more of a setup piece, so I don’t think it is really spoiling anything) Ok, here is my main problem with the book. Every female character in the book is ogled. I mean EVERY woman that walks on screen either has slept with Nathan or wants to, or he wants to, or something like that. Body parts are often described internally by the character. Butts, breasts, etc. Often compared to things. A butt compared to a pumpkin? Ther...