The Price You Pay by Aidan Truhen

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.

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