3 out of 5

HCC-117

Almost willfully difficult to read – the language is overtly naturalized; the structure flips characters, locations, and timing every 2 – 3 pages – until you realize it’s not, funneling you down a more readable and linear path, setting things up for a very slick narrative sleight of hand, Easy Death is… man, misleading. I was tearing through the back half of the book (after that aforementioned realization), flipping back to earlier pages and rather marveling at the way Daniel Boyd had put pieces into place, in plain sight, and really enjoying the way we come around to our narrator’s side in things, mostly focusing us over the shoulder of a cop in pursuit of a heisted armored car and / or its robbers, said cop picking up a local park ranger in the midst of a snowstorm, in need of her vehicle as the chase cuts through her park.

But: while I was enjoying all of that, I had to remind myself of how long it took my to get through the book’s first half, which burned through some good will with its stuttering focus, making it really difficult to get a read on who’s who, and what our focus is, and what the import is of random cut-in scenes and the slices of pages we spend with guys named Mort and Slimmy and – just to add to the confusion – a heavy who is both called Sweeney and Sweetie.

Now it’s very possible that a smarter reader has no problem with this, and what I am defining as a sleight of hand was actually obvious, but the book just didn’t click until that point in my experience, further slowed down by the naturalized language I mention – characters all speaking in gangster patois, dropping articles and winding through pseudo-malapropisms and spoonerisms in a stream-of-babble way that I think works fine in real life, but ends up looking (and sounding) wrong in text. You can do this kind of stuff selectively, but when all of our characters are speaking that way, it’s disruptive.

Given all of this, you’re gambling that your reader sticks through it past the point of Boyd having done all his setup, and zeroes in on our cop’s / the park ranger’s pursuit through the snow, and into a tense shootoff, then further on to some really clever cat-and-mouse at the book’s final main location. Fairly, the short chapters (and overall book length) reduce some barrier to entry, but all the same, I can’t really say I was enjoying the first part of the book.

But I did stick it out, and I’m incredibly glad I did: whether or not I’m overselling that sleight, it’s one that still works after you’re aware of it, making rereading the book – which I essentially did, skimming back through the opening – honestly more enjoyable, and letting me better luxuriate in its very effective second half.