With S.A Cosby at the wheel, ‘Blacktop Wasteland’ is a confident, gritty, noirish tour-de-force of American crime fiction. Diamond heists, car chases, backstabbing and shoot-outs aplenty, the novel speeds forwards, lurching from one dramatic set-piece to the next. However, there is a richness to the characterisation and a lyricism to the prose that moves this crime novel up a gear, into something much more impactful than your usual paint-by-numbers thriller.

Beauregard “Bug” Montage is not just my favourite character name of 2020, but is an absorbing protagonist, the archetypal, flawed anti-hero with daddy issues and unrivalled talent behind the wheel. It is testament to Cosby’s writing that he manages to make the “just one more job and then I’ll be a better husband and father” cliché so compelling. There is a melancholic, mesmerising quality to the prose throughout that manages to be both literary and propulsive. Even if the story makes pit-stops at all the expected places, it is never less than good fun joining Beauregard on this ride.

Normally, I avoid anything to do with cars. I literally couldn’t care less about them. And yet, when Bug gets behind the wheels of his beloved Duster in the epic final scene, my internal cheerleader whooped and hollered.

Think ‘Drive’ but set in the rural black south and you’re perhaps half way there. If you like crime fiction, you’ll love this. If you don’t, you’ll probably still like it a lot. So, belt up, take it for a spin, you won’t regret it

Okay I’m out of car-based metaphors now so I’ll end here.