All is good in the life of Jack Price. His drug operation is the Amazon of cocaine trafficking...but then: His downstairs neighbor is professionally executed. That the murder is a sign for Jack becomes perfectly clear a few days later when he arrives home and is beaten to a bloody pulp by a squad of enforcers. Now revenge is on his mind.
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.
