A humanizing story about the lives of the people who work at a 1990s strip club and the the two women who are involved in a car crash. One dies and one is abducted. From there we learn more about both the detectives investigating the case and the women's co-workers. I loved that this was a multi-POV story and that it was something written from personal experience for the author. Great on audio and highly recommended. Much thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my ALC!

i was excited about the premise of this mystery/thriller set in the 90s. Unfortunately it fell flat for and I ended up giving up about halfway through.

I listened to the audio version which may have the been the problem. There were too many POV which made it difficult to keep track of. The narration was a little dull without a lot of emotion behind the words which I think made it difficult to connect with any of the characters.

2 stars for the premise as it was not anything I’ve come across.

I had a good time reading this- it was a tad difficult to follow with the different characters having multiple names but overall a pretty good thriller. I will say the most intriguing part was the interview with the author at the end. Hearing her discuss her own personal experience and how they tie into the story was so interesting. I loved the relationships between the dancers and I would have loved more of that- possibly in a follow up?? I have never read from the perspective of a strip club and it’s employees, but it made for an incredibly interesting plot line and character development.

Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced readers copy in exchange for my honest review.

"She lets his kidness be enough." -From Real Easy

4 stars

This was a character driven murder mystery. One of the big strong points is the diverse set of characters, all who are given enough time to make them seem real. It was great to get a showing of a great step-mother relationship. That deep dive does sort of throw off the pace from your standard police procedural.. The setting is also very descriptive and immersive. I found some of the people hard to keep straight, especially as most have two names. A great read for anyone who likes character focused mysteries.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest opinion.

Thanks to NetGalley & Macmillan Audio for providing me with an audio-ARC of this novel.

The audio narration by Eva Kaminsky was really well done. I would absolutely listen to another novel read by her. Consider this a HUGE endorsement for her to read more books.

At the end of the audiobook, there was an interview with the author that was really interesting. The interview discusses Rutkowski's inspiration for the novel, including her prior profession which surprised me a little. In the interview, Marie Rutkoski states it was one of her goals, to create characters that the reader would love & care about. I think she absolutely accomplished this. I truly did care about all of them....well except for the killer.

Speaking of characters, there were a lot of them. I mean, it took place at a strip club, so obviously there were stage / real names. The stage / real names were used interchangeably, so that got a little confusing. I had an incredibly hard time keeping all of the characters sorted in my head. I even took some notes because I didn't want to get any of them mixed up. HOWEVER, my having a hard time keeping all of the characters sorted wasn't a big deal because of the way the book was written. Despite a large cast of characters (going by more than 1 name), Rutkowski made it easy to follow where she was headed as the story progressed.

I would 100% read another novel from this author. This was a solid novel and the story held my attention the whole time.

Quote: "...on a call where the body had decomposed so badly that it sprung a leak." (I felt like I could legit SMELL the crime scene with this quote).

Urban Dictionary Knowledge: "Skunk Me" (nope, nope, nope...I think I just threw up a little)

Unfortunately I had to DNF this book, it just wasn’t for me. I appreciate the opportunity to receive an advanced listener’s copy.

For the reader that enjoys a dark literary mystery. Rutkowski writes a character-driven tale of the murder and disappearance of two dancers from a Midwestern strip club. The author drew real life inspiration for this debut as she herself worked as a stripper in her 20s. You can see she has a great compassion for each of the women in this story. Unfortunately, this didn’t quite live up to the hype for me and I think that’s for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the overabundance of POV’s. Most of the girls at the club go by two names so keeping track of who is who can be quite the task. Secondly, I expected this to be a compulsive and unputdownable read but found it dragging a little towards the middle. Overall, I appreciate what the author had to say and can see why other readers have sung its praises.

I love a good crime novel and I really like the plot of this novel and most of the characters. The narrator was good and the audiobook is well produced and well performed. However, there were a few things that didn't work for me and I struggled with it.
What worked: multiple POVS, you get chapters from the anonymous serial killers POV and I think that added a great element to the story. I think there is a lot of commentary on the danger of being a woman and how we find ourselves constantly on guard and I thought that well well written.
What didn't work: While I loved the POVS, with the inclusion of the real names and the stripper names it did get confusing for me a few times. There is an inclusion at the end of an interview with the author that was very insightful, it turns out that this story was inspired some of her real experiences working as a stripper. That's great, but I didn't love the way that sex work was handled in the book. It paints the picture that the women who were working as dancers were doing so because it was their only option or that they had really poor lives and they were stuck in that role. And while I am sure that is the case for some women who work as dancers, I think that the view of strippers and sex work in general has really changed in the last 20 years. I had to keep reminding myself that the story was set in 1999, that it is not modern, but it was hard to do that at times.
Also, while I think the inclusion of an intersex character and a biracial main character was great, it really did feel like those inclusions were just to check some boxes, as well as the lesbian relationship that develops seemingly out of nowhere towards the end of the book.
This book had some good things going for it, but I think there were more things about it that didn't work for me than did. However, as I said, the book was well written so I would absolutely give another book by this author a try and I would still round this up to a 3 star rating.

Real Easy by Marie Rutkoski
Pub Date: 1/18/22

Well, this audiobook was a pleasant surprise. I was drawn to the synopsis of a thriller taking place at a strip club in '99..add a serial killer and what could go wrong? Oh, the possibilities. The cast was pretty diverse. We have illnesses, different races, we tap into disability, and more.

Women's bodies are threatened every single day and this story served as a reminder. I appreciated that you get so much more than what you read in the description here. There was a lot of depth yet was dark and gritty. I finished within 24 hours and it kept me guessing until the very end! I was stumped and the ending was moving.

There was an author/narrator interview at the end and Marie explains that the plotline was *loosely* based on her own experience as a dancer. She took a couple of those encounters and built the plot around that.

Also, FYI this was the author's debut Psychological Thriller. She writes Children's and YA novels. Well done! This is one to add to your Goodreads.

Thank you @netgalley @henryholtbooks @marierutkoski for the chance to listen early!

Really enjoyed this look into the 90s strip club scene. This story sold me less on the mystery and more on the great cast of characters! Truly wonderfully written and I’d highly recommend picking this one up!

I received a copy of this audiobook at no cost in exchange for my honest opinion.

Well I loved THE MIDNIGHT LIE by Marie Rutkoski and this book has an intersex main character (it sounds like she has XXY chromosomes and she refers to her variation as “her syndrome” and is super embarrassed about it, but it is the 90s and I was personally not around to bake her a cake about it!) so obviously I HAD to read this. It’s absolutely incredible as a book; it’s gritty but also full of heart, it’s queer, it’s about dancers at a strip club, there’s cute kids in it who are written well. It’s ALSO a murder mystery! It’s literally all my favorite things wrapped up in a book!

HOWEVER. I don’t think you should read this on audiobook. This is a many-multiple perspectives book, and I think that it would be a lot easier to follow were it not on audiobook. I feel like at some point I stopped paying attention for thirty seconds and I lost the thread of it, and I, personally, just would have preferred to read this via print. The narrator is excellent, but she _is _the same narrator for all of the perspectives, so that didn’t help me get back into it. I ended up re-listening to a big chunk of it, which was frustrating, but this is almost certainly my problem and not something you’re likely to encounter if you read it As A Book. I think I will probably check it out of the library in print and re-read it later this year!

REAL EASY gets 4.5 stars from me.

This book had so many POV’s and so many characters that it was a struggle for me to keep up enough to enjoy this. The basis of the book being a stripper murder mystery was different and interesting but having so many POV’s just threw me off.

REAL EASY is crackling crime fiction: Marie Rutkoski crafted characters that come alive on the page.

Set in 1999 at a strip club, I loved how chapters in REAL EASY switched perspective from dancers to cops to "him." This kept the book feeling fresh; each chapter added something -- this is a book with so little filler. And I personally enjoy getting to see people and their actions from multiple points of view (including their own!).

I hesitate to describe the premise, given that events alluded to in the synopsis were a surprise to me (having gone in without knowing anything about the book). Perhaps it's enough to provide the setting (above) and note that there's an investigation into a murder and a missing person.

I really appreciated that the women working at the strip club never felt like caricatures. Rutkoski worked as a stripper at two different clubs about twenty years ago; it felt like she both took care in creating these characters and had a good idea how things might be.

The audiobook narration was well done. It didn't bother me that there's just one narrator for the different perspectives; their name is noted at the beginning of each chapter which is helpful. Early on I wasn't sure which dancer was which, but was able to sort them out in my head before too long.

I picked up REAL EASY on a day I was under the weather and found that it was the perfect book to keep me company. It's compelling, queer, and somehow both gritty and heartfelt. At times I couldn't read fast enough. I'm so excited for others to discover and enjoy this one too.

This took me a few chapters to get dialed in. Minus the spoilers the interview with the author helped me see the book in a new light.

The way the story is put together is really well done. You know when a character switch happens to pay attention. It does skip around a lot, but there are tons of Easter eggs.

Told through over a dozen different POVs, Real Easy takes you into a 90's strip club and into the lives of those connected to it. Dancers, police officers, bouncers, children, patrons, the killer, etc.... You get to watch everything unravel through their perspectives.

This started off really strong. Then somewhere around half way, it started to drag for me. Still, I very much enjoyed this. It is fresh compared to other popular thrillers right now.

I listened to the audiobook. Audiobooks and multiple POVs can be problematic. This was not. Though only one narrator is used, it is very easy to follow. When the POV switches, you get the characters name(s) and a pause before beginning. So helpful with an audiobook!

I received a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Marie Rutkoski's Real Easy is a thriller following exotic dancers in a small American town in 1999. It starts when one dancer offers to drive another home, her car is ran off the road and her co-worker is killed and she is taken captive by a serial killer targeting dancers. I was thrilled to get a copy because I loved the author's YA fantasy novels for their beautiful, flowery prose and knew this would be such a stylistically different story and she didn't disappoint, the setting is vivid, I had several moments where I felt thrown back to the Y2K era, it bounces between more than 10 POV's that feel like real people and makes you invest in the dancers, their loved ones, and the detective struggling to put the pieces together. It gives you what you need to figure it out without being too obvious or overly misleading red herrings for a cheap bait and switch. The audio narration is great and keeping the tension building as well as making the characters come alive. Just a great story for a genre that usually leaves me underwhelmed. With a beautiful ending that reminds you there's joy in this dark world too.

The greatest thing that this book has to offer, in my opinion, is the unique narrative voice of an author who truly understands the ordeals of its characters. Rutkoski's background lends itself to this story, and I was greatly impressed by her ability to transfer her experiences into such a well-crafted novel. As far as enjoyment goes, this was more of a middle-of-the-road book for me. I can't quite grasp whether to categorize this as a thriller, mystery, or crime novel - at times it felt like all three. I think the thing that held me back from truly loving it was just the clinical nature and the predictability of it all, but ultimately I think this will be a win with lots of people!

This was a pretty solid book! I really enjoyed the story and how all the pieces of it wove together as we moved through the mystery. The plot itself was pretty unique (can’t say I’ve read a mystery/thriller about strippers before 😂) and as a whole it gave me some serious Law and Order: SVU vibes; the twists and turns were exactly what you would expect but also not at all. I also really liked the characters. They brought a lot of excitement to the plot and really pushed the story along.

I will say that, while the narrator was lovely to listen to, I wish there has been multiple narrators to cover all the characters because there were A TON. Since there were so many characters I did get confused a couple of times because I didn’t know whose POV we were in. Perhaps it would be less confusing reading the physical book but I know it is possible to do an audiobook with multiple POVs well and that just didn’t totally happen here. 😕

I gotta thank Netgalley and Macmillion Audio for giving me the opportunity to enjoy this story early. It was definitely a good one and I recommend adding this to your TBR. The physical book and audio both drop of January 18. 😊

This isn’t a story about a stripper who meets the man of her dreams and changes her life. It’s a raw, gritty and scary story about the real dangers that dancers face and how men objectify them. It’s also about the women behind the glitter and spiked heels, about their families and what lead them on the path to taking their clothes off for money.
I appreciated the graphic, real language and situations portrayed throughout the book. I’ve been to a strip club before, and as a woman observer, I noticed every small detail about the environment around me. The girls are hard, always on guard, most with far away looks in their eyes. I think the writer captured the atmosphere exactly how it really is. After listening to the author interview, following the story, I learned that Rutkoski was a stripper at one point in her life. That real life experience resonated in what she wrote.
I picked up the book because of the murder mystery aspect, which was very intriguing and held my interest, but realized quickly there was much more to it then the thrill. The characters, the women, in this story are all unique and interesting. I think that if the murders never happened, the story would still have been good with just the drama and backstories of the women. Even the lady cop was fascinating.
As an audiobook I was disappointed with the choice of narrator. She read the book with almost a staccato voice, and sometimes monotone. I felt she was reading, not living the book as I like to hear. It did annoy me, but I was too into the story to let it ruin the book for me. I also think a second narrator, a male voice,would have added something to the story as well.
My rating for this book is strictly for the content and the writing of the book. If it was just based on the audio version, it would be lower. But I really want to stress that I enjoyed the book itself.

Thank you Netgalley and Macmillan Audio for this arc.

This gripping mystery novel is set in 1999 and Samantha is a dancer at the Lovely Lady strip club. She has a jealous boyfriend and loves and cares for his daughter Rosie as if she was her own - Samantha has a chromosomal syndrome that impedes her of conceiving a child. She is a kind character who wants to be the best possible mother for this child.

At work, Samantha gets close to Jolene, a new stripper who is still trying to figure out how to do her job and what are the rules at the strip club. One night, Jolene seems to feel sick and Samantha offers to take her home but they never make it to their destination. Now, detectives Victor Amador and Holly Meylin need to figure out what happened to these two women that night.

The story is told from multiple perspectives adding extra layers to the plot. The subplots enhance the story and give the reader more information about secondary characters and about what happened to Samantha and Jolene. I liked how the strip club setting and the strippers’ personal lives were described, showing their vulnerabilities, their fears, and dangers they face at workplace, how society scarcely sees them, as if they were not human beings, as well as how women’s bodies are often violated.

Eva Kaminsky narrates this audiobook with an engaging voice, pacing the voice of the many characters, absorbing their manners and accents. The solving of the mystery keeps you guessing until the end. When you start listening to this audiobook you will not want to stop. I loved listening to the afterword in which the narrator interviews the author and we get to know a little bit more about the inspiration for writing this story. Great book. I definitely recommend it to all fans of mystery and thrillers.