All the Sinners Bleed Review

  • Author: S.A. Cosby
  • Series: Standalone
  • Genre: Thriller
  • Star Rating: 5 stars
  • Gifted by Publisher: No

Plot: Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, Charon has had only two murders. After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface. Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. Those festering secrets are now out in the open and ready to tear the town apart. As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon. With the killer’s possible connections to a local church and the town’s harrowing history weighing on him, Titus projects confidence about closing the case while concealing a painful secret from his own past. At the same time, he also has to contend with a far-right group that wants to hold a parade in celebration of the town’s Confederate history.

 haven’t read a thriller this dark in a very long time. Most of my mysteries tend to be cosy crime or historical crime so it’s been an age since I picked up a contemporary thriller that focuses on the darkness of humanity rather than the cosiness of English village life.

I picked this up after watching a video of an author event on TikTok and I found Cosby to be very funny and engaging. After that, I saw loads of my mutuals recommend this book so I knew it had to be my next read.

This book follows the first black sheriff of Charon County who tries to serve his community, many of which don’t support a black sheriff, and also to locate a mysterious killer who had been hiding under the radar for years. This book is full of secrets, darkness and at one point I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to finish it as Cosby really gets into the depths of how evil humanity can be.

The pillar of this book is our main character Titus Crown. A stalwart ex FBI now Sheriff who is dealing with his own personal demons finds himself in the middle of the most horrific case in his home town. Following him as he tries his hardest to follow his code of honour, respect the badge and deal with the racist part of his community was a very powerful read. He was the kind of character that you would want supporting you and having your back. I normally find ‘down and out detective’ characters can be a hard read, and sometimes quite boring, but I really enjoyed Crown as a character. Titus is a character of complexities trying to make a change in a community dead set against change.

The plot itself had me questioning if I had the mind or the stomach to finish it as Cosby gets to the core of how awful humanity can be and I was unsure if I could continue but I was so drawn in by Titus as a character that I kept on reading. This book was full of twists and turns where you truly didn’t know what was going to happen next and I found myself unable to put it down. I would read it on the bus to work and spend the entire day thinking about when I could pick it back up as I needed to know how it ended. I ended up reading the last 100 pages in one sitting.

Cosby’s writing was incredibly engaging and I have to say I loved how he ended most chapters with an amazing one liner that would send shivers down your spine. This book required a lot of nuance, detail and care as the themes in this book tackle racism, death, grief and other awful things I can’t write down. Cosby managed to get across all the complexities of both our main character, religion and our feelings towards it after death, what it is like being black in a community that was raised on racist ideology.

This was just an incredible read out of my comfort zone that I was so glad I have read.

August 2024 TBR

So despite my announcement of 30 volumes in 30 days I am still trying to read some novels during that time hahaha!

New Releases

  • Title: The Book Swap
  • Author: Tessa Bickers
  • Series: Standalone
  • Format: Paperback
  • Age Rating: Adult
  • Genre: Romance
  • Pages: 336
  • Publication Date: 03/09


Plot: Still reeling from a recent tragedy, Erin Connolly knows she needs to start living, but has no idea how. When she accidentally donates her favorite book—a heavily annotated copy of To Kill a Mockingbird containing a memento she can’t be without—to a local little community library, she’s devastated. But then the book turns up a week later, back in the library with fresh notes in the margins, along with an invitation in a copy of Great Expectations to meet her newfound pen pal. A life-changing conversation, written only in the margins of beloved classic books, begins between Erin and her Mystery Man. Following each other through the pages of their favorite novels as the book exchange continues, they both begin to open up, falling into a friendship…and maybe something more. But Erin and her pen pal have a shared history that neither of them has guessed. Faced with painful reminders of the past—and the one person she swore never to forgive—Erin finds herself at a crossroads. One that could change her life forever.

  • Title: The Last Gifts of the Universe
  • Author: Riley August
  • Series: Standalone
  • Format: Paperback
  • Age Rating: Adult
  • Genre: Sci-Fi
  • Pages: 204
  • Publication Date: 05/09


Plot: When the Home worlds finally achieved the technology to venture out into the stars, they found a graveyard of dead civilisations. What befell them is unknown. All Home knows is that they are the last ones left – and whatever came for the others will one day come for them. Scout is an Archivist who scours the dead worlds of the cosmos for their last gifts: interesting technology, cultural rituals – anything left behind that might be useful to Home and their survival. During an excavation on a lifeless planet, Scout unearths something unbelievable: a surviving message from an alien who witnessed the world-ending entity thousands of years ago. Now Scout, their brother and their sometimes-fearless, space-faring cat, Pumpkin, must race to save what matters most.

  • Title: What A Way To Go
  • Author: Bella Mackie
  • Series: Standalone
  • Format: Paperback
  • Age Rating: Adult
  • Genre: Murder Mystery
  • Pages: 400
  • Publication Date: 12/09


Plot: One wealth-obsessed man – who is also dead. One status-obsessed woman – who is the perfect accessory. Their four inheritance-obsessed children – each with a killer instinct. And a murder-obsessed outsider looking to expose them all…

  • Title: Sorrow Spring
  • Author: Olivia Isaac-Henry
  • Series: Standalone
  • Format: Paperback
  • Age Rating: Adult
  • Genre: Thriller
  • Pages: 448
  • Publication Date: 12/09


Plot: 1978. When teenager Rina Pine is dumped by her hippy mother in the parochial village of Sorrow Spring, and forced to live with her aged aunt, Agatha Pine, she doesn’t think things can get any worse.
There she finds a community beholden to the past, and a village in the grip of a close-knit circle of older women who worship the local spring and its patron saint, all under the leadership of the formidable Agatha. But when a child goes missing and a young mother is killed, Rina is drawn into the dark and sinister truth flowing through the sacred waters that give the place its name. Rina is about to learn what it truly means to be a daughter of Sorrow Spring…

Backlist

  • Title: One of Us Knows
  • Author: Alyssa Cole
  • Series: Standalone
  • Format: Paperback
  • Age Rating: Adult
  • Genre: Thriller


Plot: Years after a breakdown and a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder derailed her historical preservationist career, Kenetria Nash and her alters have been given a second chance they can’t refuse: a position as resident caretaker of a historic home. Having been dormant for years, Ken has no idea what led them to this isolated Hudson River island, but she’s determined not to ruin their opportunity. Then a surprise visit from the home’s conservation trust just as a Nor’easter bears down on the island disrupts her newfound life, leaving Ken trapped with a group of possibly dangerous strangers—including the man who brought her life tumbling down years earlier. When he turns up dead, Ken is the prime suspect. Caught in a web of secrets and in a race against time, Ken and her alters must band together to prove their innocence and discover the truth of Kavanaugh Island—and their own past—or they risk losing not only their future, but their life.

  • Title: Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise
  • Author: Lin Yi-Han
  • Series: Standalone
  • Format: Paperback
  • Age Rating: Adult
  • Genre: Literary Fiction


Plot: The most influential book of Taiwan’s #MeToo movement—a heartbreaking account of sexual violence and a remarkable reinvention of the trauma plot, turning the traditional Lolita narrative upside down as it explores women’s vulnerability, victimization, and the lengths they will go to survive. One of the biggest books to come out of Taiwan in the last decade, Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise is a chilling tale of grooming and its lingering trauma, and the power structures that allow it to flourish. Insightful, unsettling, emotionally raw, it is a staggering work of literature that reverberates across cultures and forces us to confront painful truths about the vulnerability and strength of women and those who use and hurt them.

  • Title: Percy Jackson and The Chalice of the Gods
  • Author: Rick Riordan
  • Series: Percy Jackson #6
  • Format: Hardback
  • Age Rating: YA
  • Genre: Fantasy


Plot: Percy Jackson, modern-day son of Poseidon, is just trying to get through high school. After saving the world multiple times by battling monsters, Titans, and giants, Percy is now settling in at Alternative High School in New York, where he hopes to finally have a normal senior year. Unfortunately, the gods aren’t quite done with him yet. Poseidon breaks the bad news that if Percy expects to get into New Rome University, he will have to fulfill three quests in order to earn the necessary three letters of recommendation from Mount Olympus. The first task is to help Ganymede, Zeus’s cupbearer, retrieve his golden goblet before it falls into the wrong hands. You see, one sip from it can turn a mortal into a god, and Zeus would not be pleased with that result. Can Percy and his friends Grover and Annabeth find the precious cup in time? And if they do, will they be able to resist its special power?

  • Title: North Woods
  • Author: Daniel Mason
  • Series: Standalone
  • Format: Paperback
  • Age Rating: Adult
  • Genre: Literary Fiction


Plot: When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants . An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive. Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?

Speak of the Devil Review

Seven women stand in shock in a seedy hotel room; a man’s severed head sits in the centre of the floor. Each of the women – the wife, the teenager, the ex, the journalist, the colleague, the friend, and the woman who raised him – has a very good reason to have done it, yet each swears she did not. In order to protect each other, they must figure out who is responsible, all while staying one step ahead of the police. Against the ticking clock of a murder investigation, each woman’s secret is brought to light as the connections between them converge to reveal a killer.

The Twyford Code Review

s and annotations. He took it to his remedial English teacher, Miss Isles, who became convinced it was the key to solving a puzzle. That a message in secret code ran through all Edith Twyford’s novels. Then Miss Isles disappeared on a class field trip, and Steven’s memory won’t allow him to remember what happened. Now, out of prison after a long stretch, Steven decides to investigate the mystery that has haunted him for decades. Was Miss Isles murdered? Was she deluded? Or was she right about the code? And is it still in use today? Desperate to recover his memories and find out what really happened to Miss Isles, Steven revisits the people and places of his childhood. But it soon becomes clear that Edith Twyford wasn’t just a writer of forgotten children’s stories. The Twyford Code has great power, and he isn’t the only one trying to solve it…

Seven Down ARC Review

Seven ordinary hotel employees. Catering, Reservations, Management. Seven moles, waiting for years for a single code word, a trigger that will send them into action in a violent event that will end their dull lives as they know them. The event has failed: the action was a disaster. Each employee is being debriefed by an agent of an invisible organization. These are the transcripts of these interviews. What they reveal is not just the intricate mechanism of an international assassination, but the yearnings inside each of its pawns, the desperation and secret rage that might cause any one of us to sign up, sell out, and take a plunge into darkness.

Ace of Spades Review

Welcome to Niveus Private Academy, where money paves the hallways, and the students are never less than perfect. Until now. Because anonymous texter, Aces, is bringing two students’ dark secrets to light. Talented musician Devon buries himself in rehearsals, but he can’t escape the spotlight when his private photos go public. Head girl Chiamaka isn’t afraid to get what she wants, but soon everyone will know the price she has paid for power.  Someone is out to get them both. Someone who holds all the aces. And they’re planning much more than a high-school game…

March 2021 Wrap Up

Started off the month a bit rocky as I DNFed my first book of the year. But I ended up ending on a good note. I also didn’t complete on of my challenges, this was the first time since I have started my blog. I always try to prioritise my challenges but I too many other books lined up that I wanted to read more of.

  • I read 5 books this month.
  • I DNFED my first book of the year this month.
  • I didn’t complete my ONTD challenge for the month.
  • Genre: I read 2 thrillers, 2 fantasy and 1 steampunk.
  • Gender of authors: 3 men and 2 women
  • Race of authors: 4 asian and 1 white.
  • Age range: I read 3 adult, 1 middle grade and 1 I was not sure of the age range.
  • Format: I read 3 paperbacks, 1 ebooks and 1 webcomic.

Bullet Train – Kotaro Isaka (DNF)

So, this was an ARC given to me by _ and personally it just didn’t capture me. If felt a little bit like a chore to pick up the book each time. Not much to say about this book.

City of Secrets – Victoria Ying (3 stars)

I am trying to venture more into graphic novels and such and I picked up this fun middle grade GN. I loved the art style and the characters in this book. I felt the setting and the friendships were really good as well. It did feel slightly rushed but it wasn’t a major factor in my enjoyment of the book.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and A Link to the Past Manga – Akira Himekawa (4 stars)

I preferred this book over the Ocarina of Time one I read in Feb. I felt that the first game (Majora’s Mask) was adapted super well but I wish that it was longer. I felt that the story itself was over too quickly. The ALttP game was my favourite, maybe it’s because I never played it so it was a fresh new story for me to read but I felt that the characters were great, there was some brilliant world building and as per the art was beautiful.

PIGPEN – Carnby Kim (4 stars)

So, I started this webcomic back in January and only got round to finishing it in March but it was sooooo good. It went to places I didn’t expect, the art was super creepy and I loved the colour pallet. I highly recommend it.

Red Seas Under Red Skies – Scott Lynch (4 stars)

This took me such a long time to finish but I really enjoyed it. I loved the world-building, the friendship between Locke and Jean, the female characters in it were so much better than the last book and I just enjoyed getting lost into the world and the story.

PIGPEN Review

A relaxing getaway in paradise, or a death trap? A young man wakes up on a breathtaking beac, but he has no idea who he is or how he got there. Try as he might to piece it all together, untangling this mind-bending mystery won’t be easy when every clue leads to more maddening questions… and the family that welcomes his into their home is not what they seem.