Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby

The Buick sailed off the overpass.  It plummeted twenty-five feet like a stone.  The trunk slammed into the pile of dirt , but the dirt helped to cushion their fall.  The edge of the overpass rapidly receded into Beauregard's vision as they fell.  He braced himself by gripping the steering wheel and leaning back in his seat as hard as he could.  The rear bumper took some of the force.  The load-leveling shocks he had installed took the rest.  He coule feel every inch of the steel plating he welded to the chassis stretch to its tensile limit.

--S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland (Flatiron Books, 2020) 

Blacktop Wasteland is a riveting crime and chase book and, like the best crime novels (Raymond Chandler, John D. MacDonald, Wahloo and Sjowall) it works on multiple levels, including the politics and economics of a particular milieu; in the case of Blacktop Wasteland it's about the poor whites and Blacks in southern Virginia.  Beauregard Montage is a Black auto mechanic whose shop in losing business to a newer, whiter place and Beauregard needs money badly:  his daughter is going to college,  his mother is about to get thrown out of her nursing home and rent on his shop and trailer are due.  So he takes a job driving the getaway car in a jewelry store heist.  Some of the details of the robbery strain credulity but Cosby describes the caper and the getaway with style, as the diamonds they steal turn out to belong to a local mob, who track down the robbers and make them do a dangerous robbery of a rival gang, and that's when things turn to hell, with everyone eventually dead except Beauregard, who feels like he is repeating the sins of his long-absent father against the wishes of his second wife and two young children. Can he stop?  As he says to his wife, "I don't know if I can."

Southern Virginia is effectively described by Cosby:  beautiful scenery with plenty of poverty and Confederate flags, full of hard workers, the unemployed and the methheads, where life is sometimes cheap and almost everything else is expensive.