Just beware: if you don’t like head hopping, this is probably not the book for you. It’s all too much, and the book begs for order and rationale.Īnd yet Real Easy is worthwhile for its genuinely gripping mystery. In fact, there are a whopping fourteen different voices at play here, including one-and-done chapters from Nick and Rosie. I understand giving one to Samantha, to Georgia, to Victor and Holly and even the perp, but we get ripped out their headspaces to the other dancers and even one of the red herring suspects far too frequently. The tension is what’s most notable about the book, and we genuinely root for Samantha to be found safely.īut even though Real Easy is a hammer blow – shocking and horrifying, intense in every way – I can’t fully recommend it because there are an insanely high amount of PoVs at play. We come to understand the world of midnight buffets and champagne rooms – and the workaday dullness of maintaining both – as the novel goes on. It’s a hard read with a few victories thrown in for the good guys, all operating under the thin veneer of nightmarish tension. Real Easy is a blunt, heartbreaking and realistic mystery, a little like being whacked over the head with a tire iron. As Holly and Victor battle corruption and problems of their own, Ruby struggles to stay alive and the club tries to get along with business as usual. Georgia, who works with Ruby and Jolene, becomes determined to find out what happened to her friends and finds herself allied with Holly. Victor Amador and Holly Meylin are the two detectives assigned to the case, but find only one body at the scene. But along the way Samantha and Jolene are run off the highway, resulting in a wreck which kills Jolene and sees Samantha being kidnapped. Samantha makes friends with a new girl called Jolene, and one night she drives the girl home. The money she makes at the Lady helps support her live-in lover’s daughter Rosie – who is as close to her as her own flesh and blood – and Nick, her lover, as well. She’s a veteran in the field at this point.

One of the many who works at the club is woman named Ruby, and she dances under the name Samantha.

It’s 1999, the women stand on the brink of a new millennia, and they are weary and jaded, but do not lack humor about their lives. Ruby is one of a number of girls who dance at the Lovely Lady, selling fantasies and lapdances to the lonely and the horny during the day.

Real easy marie