I’ve just finished this one after previously reading Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland and All the Sinners Bleed, both of which I really enjoyed thanks to the great vibe Cosby lays down with his writing and his main characters, which simultaneously manage to be the coolest most badass dudes around but have actual complexity and inner turmoil that feels real behind all of that.
My Darkest Prayer is Cosby’s first book, and I could definitely tell. It’s way more crass, feeling like 70s exploitation media rather than straight up crime noir, and the characters don’t have a ton of complexity to them, but I ended up loving it in a different way to his other books.
My Darkest Prayer follows Nathan Waymaker. I’ve never read Jack Reacher books, but from what I can gather Nathan is a half-black Rwacher. He’s a brick shithouse of a man that never loses a fight, he’s never wrong, he always does the right, he’s had sex with half the women in town and the other half want to have sex with him, he’s basically a master detective despite his background as a funeral services guy in the marines and small town sheriffs deputy (that ended when he threw someone through a plate glass window) and he’s always got the coolest lines to come back at his rivals with.
Nathan reads like the self-insert character a 12 year old dreamt up and finally got a chance to write about as an adult, and despite how negative that sounds I loved it. When I first started the book, I was noticing all these cliches it followed and mentally docking it some points, but as I kept reading I just found myself having so much fun taking in this story.
At the end of the day, the book is closer to a Netflix series I would binge over the weekend than it is to the Godfather, but sometimes I need that and appreciate it.
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