Too Easy

by Bruce Deitrick Price

Overview

“A witty and entertaining look at our dark sides.” —Kirkus Reviews

Robert Saunders is a newspaper editor with a Volvo, a place in the suburbs, and a marriage that’s getting dull.

Kathy Becker, who works at the same newspaper, has no doubt that Robert deserves a better wife. Her. Kathy is smart, focused, and pretty. Robert hardly knows what hits him, especially when Kathy starts seducing him in secluded corners of their building.

Soon Robert knows he’s in love. He’s ready for a hot new marriage. But Anne Saunders isn’t going to give up her husband that easily. And though she’s not usually the kind to take desperate measures, she decides to defend what is hers.

Suspenseful and harrowing, sometimes funny and often sexy, Too Easy is the “unwed mother of all page-turners.... So well written it’s frightening” (Kinky Friedman, author of Elvis, Jesus & Coca-Cola). It’s a stylish psychological thriller about the bad decisions we make in life and love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501140914
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	11/14/2015
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Bruce Deitrick Price is the author of American Dreams, The Man Who Falls in Love with His Wife, Big Dog, Art and Beauty and The Boy Who Saves The World. His novel Too Easy was translated into French, German and Dutch. An artist and a poet (Theoryland), he also writes extensively about education and founded Improve-Education.org in 2005. His latest book is Saving K-12 – What Happened to Our Public Schools? How Do We Fix Them?. Price’s forte is explaining the flawed theories and methods found throughout the public schools. He believes that if we don’t save the public schools, we won’t save much else. Price is the country's most prolific and aggressive writer on education. Reformers in Italy found his work and invited him to speak at the Pensare Oltre conference in Milan during October 2017. This elite Italian group refers to Price as a "famous American scholar.” He lives in Virginia Beach.

Editorial Reviews

As the answers unfold and the narrative plunges on to its surprising ending, Price catches the reader in a spellbinding account of the inner thoughts of his characters, as the simple mushrooms into the complex and right and wrong fuse.

The Daily Press

Erotic intrigue…. Too Easy employs a kind of continuous stream of consciousness in a voice that's snappy and macho.

Book World

Price writes extremely well....The book's pace is breezy and mile-a-minute, kind of like New York City where the tale is played out…. You will smile at the author’s wonderful phrases.

The Washington Times

Certainly, this is a man who has female friends: his girl talk is top class…. The film contract is probably already on his agent’s desk. Too Easy the movie could have been made in gritty and glamorous 1940s black-and-white, with Ann Baxter as Anne, Kirk Douglas as Robert and Joan Crawford as Kathy….The point of the story is how easy – too easy – it is to slip from wanting something badly to doing bad things in order to get it.

Sunday Times (UK)

A steamy exploration of Manhattan mores…. The book moves rapidly, almost breathlessly, with clever touches.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Recommended.

Cosmopolitan

Recommended.

Cosmopolitan

This awkwardly told sexual thriller about a predatory young woman obsessed with a married man isn't much more than a gussied-up knockoff of the hit film Fatal Attraction . Robert Saunders is an ambitious newspaper editor married to the lovely Anne, an attorney. At the office he meets Kathy Becker, a trashy, diminutive, highly sexed brunette, and immediately falls under her spell. Likewise, Kathy decides that Robert is just the man for her and sets about getting him. But in an intimation of violent trouble to come, soon after Robert proposes to Kathy, her former husband, an ex-con, tries to muscle his way back into her life. After deftly knocking him out with a skillet, Kathy hatches a similar, if more lethal, plan for getting rid of Anne, setting the stage for a bloody showdown at Robert's suburban home. Told for no apparent reason from several points of view and in the present tense, and burdened by flimsy characterizations, leaden dialogue and an unconvincing conclusion, Price's cockeyed cautionary tale features only a few psychologically compelling moments--not nearly enough to put up with his shabby rendering of a deadly triangle that's been traced far better elsewhere. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This tale tries so hard to be gritty and cynical that it winds up leaving the reader feeling gritty and cynical for having bothered to read it. Robert Saunders, an editor at a New York City newspaper, is seduced from his comfortable, boring life and wife by the stunning, savvy, and ruthless Kathy Becker. His life goes to hell, of course, and all reach a tragic end. It's not that Price's first novel is badly written, although his use of relentless present tense and the too-handy convenience of a shifting narrative viewpoint wear thin. Instead, it's the lack of a single likable character, of any hope for redemption, that doom the novel, along with the gnawing feeling that it's time writers quit trying to make us scared of love, of relationships, and of each other. Not recommended.-David Dodd, CARL Corp., Denver, Col.

Library Journal