Title: King of Ashes
Author: S.A. Cosby
Genre: Thriller, Crime, Mystery
Format: Audiobook
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4★)
Release Date: June 10, 2025
Synopsis
Roman Carruthers left his hometown and his family’s crematory business behind years ago, building a successful new life for himself in Atlanta.
But after his father is left in a coma following a suspicious hit-and-run accident, Roman is forced to return home, only to discover that his younger brother Dante is deeply entangled with dangerous criminals and mounting debts.
As Roman desperately tries to protect his family, old wounds begin resurfacing, including the decades-old mystery surrounding their mother’s disappearance.
And the deeper Roman gets pulled back into Jefferson Run, the harder it becomes to tell whether he’s trying to save his family… or slowly becoming just as dangerous as the people threatening them.
My Thoughts
I know I’m late to the party with this one, but wow… this book was quite THE ride.
I think heavy is probably the best word to describe it.
Not just because of the crime/noir elements, but because of how deeply the story digs into family, loyalty, generational trauma and the way the past keeps dragging people back no matter how hard they try to escape it.
Roman Carruthers was such an interesting character to follow. At first, he comes across as the successful one: intelligent, composed, financially savvy, and seemingly willing to sacrifice everything for his family.
But the deeper the story goes, the more morally twisted things become.
And honestly, that slow unraveling was one of the strongest parts of the book for me.
By the end, Roman feels less like the family savior and more like someone fully trapped inside the same destructive cycle he tried so hard to escape. There’s this constant sense that the Carruthers family is cursed in some emotional and psychological way, and no matter what any of them do, they keep getting pulled back into the fire.
Then there’s Dante…
Listen!!!
Not a single scene passed where I didn’t want to physically shake this man. Reckless, impulsive, selfish… he constantly creates disasters that everyone else has to clean up.
But somehow, even while being deeply frustrating, he still felt believable within the family dynamic.
And Neveah? Easily the character I felt the most emotional connection toward.
She’s spent so much of her life trying to hold this broken family together that by the end, her storyline felt both heartbreaking and strangely freeing at the same time.
The atmosphere throughout the book was excellent too. The small-town tension, the grit, the violence, the moral grayness… everything felt raw and emotionally heavy in the best possible way.
The audiobook narration especially worked incredibly well for this type of story and really elevated the tone and intensity of the characters. Adam Lazarre-White can't be more perfect than he already is.
My only real criticism is the ending.
It absolutely hits hard emotionally, but it also felt slightly abrupt to me. I think I just wanted a little more space afterward to sit with the consequences and emotional fallout before the story ended completely.
That’s honestly the main reason this landed at 4 stars instead of 5 for me.
Final Thoughts
Overall, King of Ashes is a gritty, emotionally brutal crime thriller that focuses just as much on family dysfunction and generational trauma as it does on crime itself.
Dark, tense, morally messy, and incredibly atmospheric, this is definitely the kind of story that lingers in your head long after finishing it.
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