AT FIRST BLUSH DAZZLE DRY HOW TO

Sinclair’s father was the arbiter and enforcer of all Rastafari principles, implementing strict rules on how to dress and behave. Despite the obtuse American conception of the laid-back Rasta enforced by Bob Marley posters in college dorms, Sinclair’s subjects are both a historically persecuted minority and a fundamentalist sect with stifling constraints built around a patriarchal obsession with women’s purity. But Sinclair’s history makes for a rich subject matter, having grown up in Jamaica in a Rastafari family. When a poet of Sinclair’s caliber ( Cannibal, 2016) writes a memoir, it almost doesn’t matter what she writes about she is certain to dazzle with her language. Titus’s fevered search for the perpetrator and his reckoning with the conditions that enabled such evil to fester are utterly compelling, but his tender reconciliations with his brother and their ultrareligious father are the true heart of the story. As the comfort of his routine falls away and Titus grasps for control, he uncovers the work of a serial killer whose unspeakable crimes have been peppered with religious iconography. A teacher’s murder at the local high school sets off a chain of violence that sends Titus - and Charon County - into a frenzy.

In 2017, Titus takes a job as the first Black sheriff in his hometown of Charon County, Virginia, a place where monuments to Confederate heroes still stand.

For one, is it possible to change institutions, rotten to the core, from within? Titus Crown, a former FBI agent with an impeccably organized closet, thinks it just might be. The best thriller of 2023 is a briskly paced, action-packed stunner underpinned by a slew of thorny philosophical and moral questions.

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