Where everyone has big talk about escaping their poor community but most can't face the task (or don't have the means) to go farther than one county over. Where those who are prosperous may only be so because they won a small fortune gambling or in the lottery, or came across an unexpected windfall either through legal or illegal means. Where people die premature deaths either through violence or ill health. The caper itself and the chaos that ensues is entertaining, but also interesting is the world that Cosby introduces us to, where almost everyone is simply getting by, and most aren't even doing that. In this one, the main protagonist, Beauregard Montage, or 'Bug' is almost cornered by his financial difficulties, into revisiting his risky former occupation as a wheelman on robberies.

Rural, poor, hardscrabble lives, lived by Black men who are trying desperately to do right, who love and are loved but are sometimes forced by circumstances back into the shadier parts of their past. Cosby not only wrote intriguing characters with whip-smart dialogue and plots that move at the speed of lightning, he introduced us to a world we might not have been familiar with. In 'Blacktop Wasteland', just as in his second novel, 'Razorblade Tears', S.A. Not since Walter Moseley's Easy Rawlins books have I felt like I was reading a writer who created his own sub-genre, or niche in fiction.

Blacktop wasteland goodreads