What’s in it for me? Follow a tense cat-and-mouse game that explores religious extremism and the lingering effects of racism in the American South.
In this gripping crime novel, we’ll follow Titus Crown, the first Black sheriff in Charon County, Virginia, as he tries to stop a serial killer hiding within the community. Along the way, Crown will have to contend with a far-right group of Confederate apologists, citizens questioning both his identity as a Black man and his integrity as a sheriff, and a guilty secret that he carries from a dark past.
The author, S.A. Cosby, a Black man raised in the American South, weaves a poignant story as complex as the many social issues it explores. Cosby draws on his own life experience, his voracious reading habits, and personal interviews to populate his books. All the Sinners Bleed wrestles with the lingering impacts of slavery in the South, crises of faith, questions of identity, and, ultimately, acceptance.
A note before we begin. This Blink deals with issues of violence, racism, and the Christian faith, as addressed in All the Sinners Bleed. While not overtly graphic, this Blink remains true to the depicted crimes and content in Cosby’s work. So please take care while consuming this Blink.
Uncovering crimes
A year after Titus Crown won his surprise election bid for Charon County Sheriff – becoming the first Black sheriff in the county’s history – he and his team respond to an active-shooter situation at a local high school. As the sheriff and his team move to enter the school, the shooter emerges, carrying a rifle and a leather mask. Titus realizes it’s Latrell Macdonald – a young Black man.
Latrell says things like, “You don’t know the things I’ve done. I tried to stop, and they said they’d kill my little brother.” Titus tells his deputies to stand down and urges Latrell to set down the gun. Latrell raises the gun above his head and runs down the school steps toward the deputies. Two of them – both white men – shoot and kill him.
They discover Latrell has shot Jeff Spearman, a white man and a well-loved teacher at the school. But Titus can’t shake Latrell’s last words, and wonders if Spearman was somehow implicated in Latrell’s comments about his brother.
Soon after, Jamal Addison, a Black pastor, confronts Titus about the incident. The pastor wants an external investigation of the police shooting. He doesn’t think Titus is doing enough as a fellow person of color.
Determined to get to the bottom of the case, Titus brings a team to investigate Spearman’s house. There, Titus finds a leather wolf mask like the one Latrell had carried, two external hard drives, and a painting of a willow tree labeled The Secret Garden. Titus thinks the willow tree looks eerily familiar.
The hard drives contain photos and videos of Spearman, Latrell, and another, unidentifiable man, all wearing wolf masks and performing unspeakable acts on countless youths. Through the video, it’s clear the trio has killed at least seven young children.
Titus knows many Charon County citizens will struggle when the truth of Spearman’s activities is revealed. Already, he’s had to deal with receiving congratulations from white men around town for “putting down” Latrell, as they term it. His own deputies, before seeing the photographic evidence, didn’t believe Spearman could have done anything to provoke Latrell’s actions.
Titus soon comes to the realization that the willow tree he recognized from Spearman’s painting is on a local landowner’s property. When they investigate, they find the remains of seven bodies in the field around the tree.
ANALYSIS
The first quarter of All the Sinners Bleed explores identity and belonging. Titus lives “in a no-man’s-land between people who believed in him, people who hated him because of his skin color, and people who believed he was a traitor to his race.” Especially when he deals with a white man congratulating him on killing Latrell, a Black youth, or with a Black pastor expecting certain behavior from him because he’s also Black, Titus struggles with his actual and perceived identities.
Everyone has an idea of how others should act, and everyone has a narrative about who they think others are based on their social position and skin color. But not everyone is as they appear to be. While publicly Jeff Spearman appeared to be an upstanding citizen, he was actually a racist pedophile and murderer. And this is only the first of many twists and turns to come.
Finding further death
The state medical examiner finds synthetic fibers on the bodies exhumed from near the willow tree, most likely from a wig, and various objects that have been inserted in the bodies. Only one of the objects is unidentified – a small, T-shaped object. The corpses also have a religious phrase carved into their flesh, and have been assaulted in multiple other ways as well.
Soon after, someone claiming he might know who the serial killer is calls the station. Titus finds the man’s voice familiar, but the caller gets spooked and hangs up before giving any names.
The next day, Titus visits a church that has the same phrase on its signboard as was carved on the victims’ bodies. The church is on a fairly isolated island. The pastor, a middle-aged white man who is part of a fundamentalist sect that handles venomous snakes as part of worship, seems to have no information connected to the case; he is curt and tries to intimidate Titus.
The next morning, a local man is found dead, strung up in the woods with the skin from his face missing. Titus realizes this was the mysterious caller with the familiar voice, Cole Marshall. Both Cole and Latrell worked at the local fish house, so Titus sends his deputy to investigate.
The chairman of the county’s Board of Supervisors once again visits Titus to demand answers and bully him into solving the case as soon as possible. Scott, a white man, tells Titus he could have him replaced as sheriff, but Titus ignores the man’s threats and overtly racist comments.
Titus’ deputy reports that at the fish house, Latrell avoided Dayane Carter – a young woman – and was good friends with Darnell Posey.
When Titus has dinner with his girlfriend, Darlene, he rants about Charon County. He says the citizens of the county should be recognizing both the good and bad parts of their county and its history, and that the ugly parts can’t just be ignored. Later that night, Titus is called into the office because Darnell – Latrell’s good friend – was caught leaving a box on the station doorstep.
Darnell found the box and an envelope of money at his own door, with instructions to leave it at the station. The box contains the skin from Cole Marshall’s face.
ANALYSIS
The second quarter of the book further explores the many expectations people have of each other based on perceived identities. Titus, for his part, struggles with navigating a world where he knows his supporters and detractors would switch positions if they knew everything about the investigation he was working on. This, along with people’s expectations of Titus based on his own skin color, support the idea that people’s opinions can be incredibly strong and yet also incredibly wrong if based purely on appearance or on incomplete facts.
The section also furthers the idea of people wearing masks – throughout the book, Titus mentions his public and private faces, his sheriff’s tone of voice or his backcountry Charon County voice. He uses his different personas or characteristics in different situations as necessary to achieve his goals, be it calming two opposing groups to avoid an outbreak of violence, or projecting strength and competence to ease another’s fears.
The idea of people or communities having many different faces ties into the idea that people aren’t always as they appear, and Titus’s lengthy speech to his girlfriend about Charon County needing to be seen for both its beauty and ugliness resonates with the idea that there can be no change for the better unless light is shone upon the darkness, revealing the secrets hidden within.
Seeking further information
The day after receiving the box at the station, Titus visits the island church again and speaks with an old white woman about the church’s history.
The woman, Griselda, tells him the pastor, Elias, and his wife passed off a child as their own several decades earlier, but he obviously wasn’t theirs – the wife wasn’t pregnant and the boy was clearly of mixed race. The pastor and his family abused the child, but though the woman called the old sheriff multiple times, no one ever investigated. No one else on the island cared about the boy’s treatment.
The pastor’s brother also apparently abused the boy, but the brother wound up dying from snakebite when someone locked him in an outhouse and dumped the pastor’s venomous snakes through the top. Griselda is certain the boy did it – he vanished soon after. She doesn’t know whether he ran away, was sent away, or suffered a worse fate.
A few days later, Titus learns that Elias, the island pastor, might be missing. He interrogates Dayane, the woman Latrell avoided at work. Titus realizes from questioning her that she knows the killer, but he has no grounds to hold her. He warns she might be in danger, just like Cole was, but she refuses to help or accept protection from the police.
When Titus attends his father’s friend’s funeral, he reminisces about his own mother and her illness. After her death, he became fixated on organization, order, and trying to fix the troubles of people he felt were under his protection.
When they return home, Titus finds a lamb’s head nailed to their door. He knows it means that he must be asking the right questions, as the killer has started to panic. This makes the situation more dangerous for Titus – but he knows he’s getting closer to the truth.
ANALYSIS
Despite Titus’s words regarding the ugliness of Charon County and his desire to fix it, in the third quarter of the story he fails to examine the state of his own life in a similar fashion. Titus repeatedly returns to his own “dark secrets,” and a past that he struggles to share or reckon with. All he lets on to the reader is that he still feels immense guilt over a decision from his FBI days, and that one of the reasons he’s exhausting himself in this case and as sheriff is his determination to atone for it. He doesn’t confess either of these things to anyone, and hiding them keeps him in pain and carrying a heavy burden.
This contradiction highlights how difficult it can be to clearly see one’s own situation – though Titus recognizes that the ugliness of Charon County needs to be acknowledged to be changed, he cannot see that the same applies to the ugliness within himself.
Closing in on the killer
Elias, the island pastor, is soon found dead in a cornfield, his body mutilated.
When Scott, the chairman of the county’s Board of Supervisors, tries to bully Titus once again into handing the case over to the state police, Titus thinks it might be a good idea. But an email from the medical examiner shares a DNA match from an online DNA company that Scott’s family had recently used. The match indicates Scott has a half-brother he never knew about – and that brother is likely the killer.
Titus visits Scott’s white mother and hears her story about having a child with a Black man. Her husband’s family arranged an illegal adoption of the child, giving Elias, the island pastor, full custody. She laments that she never even got the chance to see her child's face. Once he was with Elias, they forbade her from ever contacting him. It’s clear now that this was the abused child of Elias that Griselda had told Titus about.
When Titus returns to the office, Jamal Addison, the Black pastor, asks Titus to cancel the upcoming Fall Fest. A local far-right group plans to march in celebration of the town’s Confederate history and to protect a local Confederate statue, and Addison warns there might be violence between the far-right group and his followers if the event happens. But Titus decides to allow the group to march – they have a permit, after all, and in the eyes of the law, they weren’t doing anything illegal.
Titus soon after receives another call from the killer, threatening and taunting him once more.
That night, Titus tells his brother Marquis the heavy secret he’s been carrying. While with the FBI, he shot and killed a white supremacist terrorist who’d been trying to surrender after having killed Titus’s entire team right in front of him. The FBI covered it up and had Titus resign, leading to his breakup with his then-girlfriend, his move home, and his subsequent run for sheriff in Charon. Marquis reminds Titus that he doesn’t need to be a perfect person or fix things for everyone.
At the Fall Fest, the far-right group marches, as do Jamal Addison’s people. The festival shuts down after violence between the groups. When Latrell’s father calls the station, Titus learns Lavon, the younger brother Latrell claimed had been threatened, is missing.
With so much spiraling out of control, Titus decides to hand the case to the state police, but shortly after has a breakthrough. On a call with the medical examiner, Titus realizes the unidentified, T-shaped object discovered on one of the earliest victims was a truck lock from one of the trucks used by the local flag factory for shipping – he has just seen a similar one at the Fall Fest. He visits the factory and cross-references its delivery logs with when and where the seven victims under the willow tree went missing. He realizes Royce Lazare, a part-time factory driver and the local school bus driver, is both the boy adopted by Elias and the killer.
After arriving at Lazare’s house, Lazare surprises Titus and stabs him in the side, escaping into the backyard. Titus almost blacks out, but his mother’s voice in his head tells him to get up and save the little boy, Lavon. He discovers a hidden bunker in the backyard, where Lazare holds a knife to Lavon’s throat.
The boy stabs a paring knife into Lazare’s arm, and Titus kills Lazare before blacking out and waking up in the hospital.
With the case solved, Titus resigns as sheriff. He leaves one of his trusted deputies to finish the term for him. He’s accepted a position as a professor of criminology, and he makes his goodbyes. On his way out of town, he passes the old Confederate statue. After a moment of deliberation, he hooks his truck to the statue and topples it before driving away.
ANALYSIS
With the catharsis of confessing his secret to his brother, Titus robs the memory of its power. Their conversation explores the idea that an action can be bad or unfortunate but also bring about a lot of good. The ultimate shift in Titus’s inner world is symbolized by his final action in the story – pulling down the statue before he leaves town. Not only has Titus set down the burden of being the county’s fixer, but he’s set aside the rigid rules with which he tried to control both the world around him and himself.
For most of the book, Titus protects all the citizens of the county, including those holding racist and extremist views. He allowed the far-right group to march purely because they had the permit – in the eyes of the law, they were doing nothing wrong. However, they were also protecting a statue and a mindset that glorified a man who committed terrible crimes against other humans. While technically legal, it couldn’t be argued to be a good thing for humanity in general. Titus’s change from protecting those protecting the statue to pulling the statue down himself symbolizes the inner shift he’s undergone – setting down the burden he was carrying and accepting the grayer areas of right and wrong most people, himself included, live within.
Final summary
Sheriff Titus Crown knew his home – Charon County, Virginia – held dark secrets in its history, including racially motivated crimes and jealousy-inspired massacres. His goal as sheriff was to protect the people under his jurisdiction, partly as penance for his own tightly held secret – that as an FBI agent, he unlawfully killed a white supremacist terrorist who was trying to surrender after having killed Titus’s team in his presence.
As Titus draws closer to solving the case, the killer grows desperate, and the body count increases. Every time Titus finds someone connected to the killer, that person inevitably winds up dead in newly gruesome ways. The final clues that lead Titus to the right suspect are the story of a white woman who gave up her mixed-race baby to an illegal adoption some thirty years earlier, and a truck lock shoved down the throat of one of the killers’ victims, implicating someone working at the local flag factory.
In the final showdown between the sheriff and the killer, Titus manages to take down the killer despite a stab wound, and saves Lavon, the younger brother of Latrell, the man who started the unraveling of the serial killer’s secrets by killing his collaborator, the teacher Jeff Spearman.
Ultimately, relieved of his burden of guilt and self-recrimination, Titus resigns as sheriff. His final act before leaving town is to topple a contentious Confederate statue.