This hell-for-leather, scurrilously funny thriller is simply dazzling, despite the fact that you’d be hard-pressed to find a line suitable for quoting in a family-minded newspaper ... Into his already messy plot, Truhen tosses some serious strangeness—including a guy wearing clothes covered in knives, some really cosmic sex, a top-secret banking system and a genuinely novel use for a compressed-air cannon. The result is fizzy and cartoony, but in a good way. Love it or hate it—there’s not much middle ground here.

... Truhen’s narrator is Jack Price. 'I am Uber for illegal drugs,' he reports. 'I’m infrastructure. I’m substrate. I don’t make waves and I am polite. There’s no collateral from what I do. None at all. When they decriminalize — and they will — I will go from here to there without doing anything except sending Forbes a press release.' ... Or so he thinks. A cranky old woman is murdered in the apartment below his, and Jack grows edgy, wondering whether his smoothly corporatized cocaine distribution network is in peril. Setting out to investigate, he very rapidly and pointlessly unleashes hell upon himself in the form of the Seven Demons, a team of maniacal assassins who arrive en masse to murder him ... The Price You Pay, a slim, superbly intelligent, intensely vicious panorama of white-collar drug world mayhem by Aidan Truhn.

In Jack Price’s world, killing is as compulsive as popping bubble wrap: 'like Candy Crush', as he says, 'but with murder.' The Price You Pay is a catchy and distinctive comic revenge thriller by Aidan Truhen – the pseudonym, we are told, of an established author – with a larger-than-life narrator protagonist. He’s a mouthy wise-ass, whether musing on herbal tea, deciding the free market is 'a prick', or shooting someone in the eye ... A catchy revenge thriller.

Jack Price is a coke dealing free market entrepreneur. He sells Pale Peruvian Stallion which is, in fact, grown and processed locally. He arranges his deliveries with freelancers in the zero-hours, gig-economy spirit of modern capitalism. As Price says, he is the Uber for illegal drugs ... It’s a genius set up with a minimal supply chain that reduces any opportunities for leaks and snitches ... Then his highly successful one-man startup goes pear shaped. First, his elderly neighbour, Didi, ends up dead...She might have been an ugly bad-tempered old lady but that doesn’t mean he is happy about it. Price starts making some enquiries but earns himself a beating and a warning. He doesn’t let it go and quickly he ends up with a contract on his head. It’s a spectacular escalation but the Seven Demons are now after him ... if the style doesn’t induce grammatical apoplexy then you’ll be able to appreciate that the writing sparkles. It’s caustic and cutting. The Price You Pay is also a surprisingly warm book given the cool and calculating sociopathy of Jack Price. He’s not infallible either and for all his slightly manic thought processes he’s straight down the line. There’s no unreliable narrator here.

Not for everyone, but those who do like this particular dark brew of sarcastic, witty crime noir will drink in Aidan Truhen’s The Price You Pay and be thirsty for more.

...probably one of the most fun crime fiction books we have read in years: The story is high-octane everything as author Carl Hiaasen puts it and Truhen’s sense of of humor and his colorful storytelling style is just great ... Fast-paced, centered around a lovable antihero and funny more in the lines of South Park than cozy mysteries, The Price You Pay is definitely one of our favorites for this summer.

Technically, there’s a plot here somewhere—something involving a rich do-gooder named Sean Harper and an Icelandic dark web portal called Poltergeist—but it’s really just window dressing to set a gang of assassins called Seven Demons on Jack’s ass ... The book is more Looney Tunes than criminal noir, but it’s an entertaining trifle ... A clever little slice of gun fu, powered on popcorn and airplane-glue fumes.

The jaded and callous worldview of Londoner Jack Price, the narrator of this unpleasant crime novel from the pseudonymous Truhen, is evident from the opening sentence ... Price’s smart-alecky comments and penchant for awkward comparisons ('She looks like Didi Fraser if Didi had lived without makeup and eaten raw bear from the moment she gave up the nipple') will put off some readers.

Jack is a high-end, high-tech coke dealer, a businessman and entrepreneur, whose brand is called the Pale Peruvian Stallion. It’s the imprint on the little cellophane twists in which it arrives. He’s the Amazon of cocaine trafficking—riding high, so to speak, and no one can breach his complex security system… There’s a contract out on his life. The deadly hitmen known as the Seven Demons have been hired to take him out … With the help of his contacts in the dark web, a portal called Poltergeist, Jack plans to take the Seven Demons out one by one. The Price You Pay is an intoxicating thriller.