Blacktop Wasteland.

S.A. Cosby’s 2020 novel Blacktop Wasteland takes the one-last-job gimmick into the back woods of North Carolina, where Beauregard “Bug” Montage, a getaway driver of exceptional skill who has since retired from the larceny game, finds his legitimate business threatened with bankruptcy if he can’t come up with $20,000. Coincidentally, a thief who cost him a huge payout the last time they worked together shows up with the promise of a six-figure score if Bug will drive him and a buddy to knock over a jewelry store in Virginia. Needless to say, the job does not go as planned, leading to a high body count and a mostly predictable ride down the highways and back roads as Bug tries to save himself, his family, and maybe his business too.

Bug’s life is not conducive to being a getaway driver, as he’s now living with his wife and two kids, while he has at least one daughter from a previous relationship, and takes some care of her because her mother is an addict. This, of course, leads to some fairly obvious complications, where anyone involved in the heist gone wrong can threaten not just Bug but any members of his family. His garage is failing because one of his many nemeses in their small town has opened up another, new garage and siphoned off a large portion of his customers – but that garage conveniently burns down, and its racist white owners decide to pay Bug (who is Black) a visit. And the planning of the heist itself turns out to be less than ironclad, as what Bug’s confederates are stealing belongs to someone else who will be very unhappy to see it lost, while the two men he’s working with turn out to be less than worthy of his trust.

It’s a lot, and I don’t mean that in a good way; it feels like Cosby is artificially ratcheting up the stakes as much as he can to produce a specific level of high tension and a dire situation for Bug to escape. While the plot itself isn’t predictable, the plot’s destination is. There’s only one way this can all end, really, and you can paint in broad strokes how Cosby is going to get us there, and who’s likely to be left standing when the story ends.

That’s not to say Blacktop Wasteland is boring – it is tense, and sometimes exciting, and never slow. There’s one particular car chase that is about as well-written as I’ve seen, where Cosby translates the speed of the chase and Bug’s dexterity behind the wheel into prose without breaking the spell of the scene with extraneous descriptions. I’m not a car guy, but Cosby seems well-versed in engines and what cars might be capable of doing in the hands of someone like Bug, who is both expert driver and mechanic. I’m also not immune to the type of narrative greed created by a plot where one man is targeted by just about everyone else in the story except for his own family; Cosby pulls the rubber band as far as it can possibly go without breaking, and when he lets it go, it’s effective, even if you can guess the general outline of things to come.

In the end, however, Blacktop Wasteland felt too familiar, and in some ways too derivative of other heist novels, such as the Parker novels from Richard Stark (a pen name of Donald Westlake). Cosby may have been trying to touch on some larger themes here, especially of race, but if so, it doesn’t achieve that goal – there’s only the story itself, which is enough to sustain the read but not enough to recommend it.

Next up: P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn, winner of last year’s Nebula Award for Best Novel.