Perhaps Jack Price, the “Uber of illegal drugs,” should have remembered “no good deed goes unpunished” before he inquired into the death of Didi, his unpopular, geriatric neighbor. Jack’s morbid curiosity sets up a Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride of an adventure. Even though Didi “was an old lady and actuarially she didn’t have long but it looks like someone couldn’t wait,” Jack is pissed off—who needs this kind of crap in his New York City neighborhood?

It leaves open questions are upsetting to a certain kind of person and that kind of person is the kind that I am. So coffee while I reflect on this situation that I do not like.

Coffee is too bland a word for Jack’s respect for the macchiatos served up by Mike. Jack has an interesting view of the world. He’s preternaturally observant, and there’s no BS filter to his observations.

He’s pouring my macchiato the way you should so that it comes out in layers: milk, espresso, foam. Pale, dark, white.

Coffee is the judge of a person. Everything you need to know you can know about someone from their coffee, like I am drinking macchiato and why is that? It is the coffee of simple joy like coffee running naked in a field.

Jack lived through 9/11. He lost friends, and it was “a kinduva life-altering day” for him. Circling back to dead Didi, even though she was a “rude old lady” he didn’t like much, she was executed like a drug mule, “shot twice in the chest and once in the head,” and Jack is not okay with that. When Jack’s not okay, ain’t nobody okay because he’s a bulldog in pursuit of the truth.

The Price You Pay serves up a relentless stream of witty, ironic, and perceptive commentary shared straight from Jack Price’s consciousness without a filter. Jack misses nothing, and this is both a blessing and a curse. He can’t back off or back down from conflict, even if turning a blind eye might be wisest (and certainly better for business). And what might his business be? He’s a cocaine trafficker and proud of it, providing “zero-hour gig-economy microjobs.”

You’re not inducting newbies into the shadowy world of international smuggling, you’re just allowing stand-up citizens to turn an existing downside of the personal economy into a revenue stream. Progress is golden and I am Amazon. I am Uber for illegal drugs. I have everyone from executives in Beemers to old codgers with Z frames running cocaine for me. They know really that this is what they are doing but as long as it is never confirmed they do not care because money and maybe frisson.

Frisson, that ephemeral “strong feeling of excitement or fear,” crashes into bone-chilling/breaking reality when Jack is “beaten to a bloody pulp by a squad of enforcers” outside his own elevator. So much for his vaunted security system. Someone has taken out a contract on him, and he’s not ready to die.

But I won’t die. This is personal but it’s also more than that. Because there’s a business issue here too, and business never dies. There’s an issue of criminal territory and reputation.

Money never sleeps, and I’m the Price you pay.

Jack Price is all about reality and revenge. He doesn’t back off; he gets even. He burrows, regroups, threatens, and then comes on like a tsunami when he’s under attack. I wish you would is Jack Price’s modus operandi—bring it on folks, because he’ll make sure his enemies pay the price.

I was looking forward to this book. I was ready for the snarkiness. There was some in the beginning mixed with a bit of humor. However, there was not enough. This book for me suffered also from my lack of connection with the characters or the story. Without the connection, I struggled to find anything interesting about the story. In fact, the use of the "f" bomb was about the only thing that kept this book somewhat interesting. I tried and tried to stick with this book but after getting almost to the half way mark with little improvement, I could not read any further.

First published in Great Britain in 2018; published by Knopf on July 10, 2018

Jack Price is badass. He’s about as badass as a character can be and still be a character a reader will enjoy encountering — in fiction, because I wouldn’t want to know him in person. A Japanese police detective refers to Jack Price as a “spectacularly awful person” before wishing him luck (and promising to have him run over with a delivery truck if he ever visits Japan). That’s pretty much my reaction to Price. He’s a deplorable sociopath, but it’s impossible not to cheer for him, if only because his survival means that he’ll keep narrating the story.

Price narrates The Price You Pay in a distinctive voice. It’s hard-boiled and slangy and profane, uninfluenced by conventional rules of punctuation and sentence construction. I loved the voice. The voice gives Price instant personality while making it clear that he’s intelligent and funny and someone no sane person would want to have as a neighbor.

Price is an upscale cocaine dealer, although he outsources the actual deliveries. An elderly woman named Didi is murdered in his building. Price hated Didi but he asks questions about the murder because he doesn’t think people should be getting murdered where he lives. The killing and Price’s inquiries set in motion a wild chain of events. A contract is put out on his life which is accepted by the celebrity assassins known as the Seven Demons, marking the best day of Price’s life because all restraints are off and he’s free to do as he pleases. Seven world-class assassins versus Jack Price. It’s a pretty even match.

The story’s tongue-in-cheek nature allows it some over-the-top moments. Aidan Truhen doesn’t overdose the reader with those. Humor pervades the story, and while it is sometimes violent humor, the story’s goofiness makes it easy to like Price without worrying that he’s a sociopath. It’s hard to be squeamish about decapitation when you’re laughing out loud. It’s also easier to like a guy who is totally honest about being an asshole than it is to like an asshole who styles himself as an heroic patriot whose moral purity and sense of duty outshines everyone else (i.e., today’s typical stalwart thriller hero).

While Price behaves like a sociopath, there are signs that he might actually have a heart. There are also plenty of signs suggesting just the opposite. One of the characters even tells him that he isn’t a sociopath because “you experience the world like a normal person but there is no limit on your behavior.” In other words, he is capable of liking people and dogs but doesn’t let casual friendship stand in the way of creating mayhem to achieve his goals. And when the people he likes end up dead, he doesn’t shed many tears; he’s too busy planning the next round of mayhem. As another character tells him, Price just wants “to do appalling things and sass people and get laid.” That doesn’t sound like it should be endearing, but it is. Kudos to Truhen for making me like Jack Price.

RECOMMENDED

Not Your Average Cocaine Dealer

Jack Price is doing pretty well. He has a cocaine empire with his own brand of cocaine. He’s also got principles. He doesn’t lead kids into addiction. However, senators and day traders are fair game. He gets up one morning feeling happy, starts down in the elevator, and realizes that the floor below is littered with cops.

Didi the old lady living in the apartment below him has been murdered, assassin-style. He didn’t particularly like Didi. She was a nasty old woman, but he equally doesn’t like having people murdered on the floor below him. He asks a lot of questions, gets beaten badly, and decides to act. He tries to recruit his friend Karenina for protection, but she’s already accepted a job with the Seven Demons, a murderous gang, and their next target is Jack. Now Jack is out for revenge, and the body count gets pretty high.

This book is told from Jack’s point of view, and it’s unique. Jack has a fast paced commentary laced with profanity that doesn’t take into account quotation marks, run-on sentences, or other grammatical niceties. It’s fun to read, if you enjoy Jack’s peculiar view of the world. If profanity, lack of grammatical props, and violence upset you, this is not your book. However, it you’d like an amusing read that is often quite hilarious, give it a try.

I received this book from Knopf for this review.

I received this book for review. Once I got past all of the "I" statements it was a pretty great book. When your creative writing teachers drill that into your head to not start your stories out like that it kind of really shows up when reading other people's work. It was a little hard for me to get past I won't lie. The summary of the book is obviously what made me decide to review it. It kind of sounded a bit like something I've never heard of before and I was intrigued. I love a good mystery. Trying to figure out who killed your neighbor even if it's only because you are worried it was because they were after you. But this was just so hard for me to get into and trust me I got past the page of "I" statements. It could be because it's "Jack Price" telling the story and for me that is just not flowing for me. Due to me trying to push through the book I did not fly through this book. The guy is a total asshole, not one part of me wanted to root for him getting away from those assassins. I really wanted them to get him and torture him. The further into the book I got the worse it really got for me personally. I just hated him more. I continued to try to push through the book in hopes that it would get better or I would be able to stand him. I took a break and went to read some reviews to see what other people though. So far other reviewers seem to like it so I would say give it a shot. Check out some other reviews, just because it didn't work for me doesn't mean you won't like it.

OOps I reviewed the wrong book... HAve not read this one