S.A. Cosby already has All the Sinners Bleed in production at Netflix. And now, just when you thought his Hollywood run couldn’t get any more impressive, King of Ashes—his Godfather-inspired Southern crime epic about a family crematory business and a son who comes home to hold everything together—has found a home at FX.
Elgin James is developing a TV adaptation of S.A. Cosby’s King of Ashes at FX, with Amblin Entertainment, Higher Ground, and 20th Television attached. James will executive produce alongside Higher Ground, and Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey for Amblin, with Todd Cohen co-executive producing.
The project also marks a reunion for James with some familiar faces. Cardenas and Bourne, who both starred in his motorcycle drama Mayans M.C. across its five successful seasons on FX, are expected to be involved.
James is currently producing a Prison Break series for Hulu, and King of Ashes is already lined up as his next project after it wraps.
Who Is S.A. Cosby?
Shawn Andre Cosby is the New York Times bestselling author of My Darkest Prayer, Blacktop Wasteland, Razorblade Tears, All the Sinners Bleed, and King of Ashes. He has also co-authored three children’s books with Questlove and is working on a Marvel novel, Truth to Power: A Luke Cage Marvel Crime Novel.
His career trajectory is worth understanding. He self-published his first novel in 2014. His agent eventually placed Blacktop Wasteland with Flatiron Books, and from then on, his ascent was extraordinary. Razorblade Tears followed in 2021.
All the Sinners Bleed arrived in 2023 and became one of the year’s most acclaimed crime novels, landing on Barack Obama’s summer reading list. King of Ashes was published on October 6, 2025, and appeared on Amazon’s Best Books of 2025, TIME magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize shortlist.
NPR has called Cosby “one of the best-known names in the new, wonderfully diverse wave of crime fiction writers.” Former Amazon editor Vanessa Cronin put it even more directly, describing him as “one of the greatest American crime writers ever to do it.”
What Is King of Ashes About?
Cosby has described the ambition behind King of Ashes with the kind of clarity that makes you understand exactly what you’re getting into:
“I think, for me, ‘King of Ashes’ scratches a personal itch, which is the crime epic, a la ‘Goodfellas’ or ‘The Godfather’ or ‘Menace II Society.’ I wanted to see what mob bosses are like at home when they aren’t planning murders, and how their skills affected the rest of their lives.”
That instinct is the heart of the novel. The Godfather comparison is not hype — it is the precise DNA of what Cosby built here.
Five years ago, Roman Carruthers left his family’s crematory business in the decaying central Virginia town of Jefferson Run and built a successful life as a financial advisor in Atlanta. When his father Keith is left comatose in a suspicious hit-and-run, Roman comes home to find the family on the edge of collapse.
The official description lays out what he finds:
When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family and the family business together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident, and Dante’s recklessness has placed them all in real danger.
Roman is a wealth manager. He has skills that are useful in some rooms and useless in others. The gang Dante has gotten himself indebted to, led by the terrifying twin brothers Torrent and Tranquil of the Black Baron Boys, is exactly the kind of room he’s in.
The Atlantic captured the novel’s particular pleasures with precision: “The flashy sequences of violence feel apt for TV, but the novel’s real draw is the quieter ache of a family torn apart.” Library Journal gave it a starred review, calling it a “fast-paced thriller reminiscent of the great tragedies” and “Cosby at his best.”
Why Elgin James and FX Are the Right Home?
FX’s track record in Southern Gothic crime drama—Justified, Fargo, The Bear, Shogun—makes it the natural home for a story as much about family as violence. The network knows how to hold both registers without sacrificing either.
Elgin James is the specific choice that makes this feel genuinely exciting. He co-created Mayans M.C., the FX spinoff from Sons of Anarchy, and ran it through five successful seasons. Mayans M.C. is a show about family, loyalty, legacy, and the violence that comes when those things are under threat—which is precisely the emotional and structural DNA of King of Ashes.
The Higher Ground and Amblin combination brings the Obamas’ production company and Steven Spielberg’s outfit together on a project they clearly fought to keep through the development transition from Netflix.
The book went to auction with as many as twelve competing bids before the original Netflix deal was struck. The fact that Higher Ground and Amblin have shepherded it to FX with Elgin James attached signals that this team knows exactly what they have and are committed to getting it right.
No cast, writer, or premiere date has been announced beyond these initial development details.
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