MORE PRAISE for ONE SIMPLE THING

“A twisting, twisted tale full of well-developed characters and dense setting, One Simple Thing is a story that will hold you in its grip until the satisfying end.”

—JESSICA BARKSDALE INCLÁN, author of The Burning Hour and When We Almost Drowned

“This tense, layered story brings us into the world of hardscrabble folks who are fighting and often failing to get by. Opening on a boy’s heart-wrenching journey through the implosion of his family, One Simple Thing flowers into a captivating crime mystery. While tempting to compare Warren Read to classic crime writers, he also vividly chronicles lives lived on the margins, like writers such as Larry Brown or Willy Vlautin.”

—THOMAS KOHNSTAMM, author of Lake City

“Disguised as a tense crime story set in the sparse landscape of the American West, Warren Read’s One Simple Thing is really a probing evocation of loneliness and the ways it skews the search for meaningful relationships. Read writes dialogue as if it were an industrial diamond, sharp and faceted and capable of cutting through granite. Rodney and Otis are as original a set of partners-in-crime as you’ll find in American fiction, and Nadine is trying so hard not to be disappointed in men that she latches onto despair and convinces herself it is hope.”

—KENT MEYERS, author of Twisted Tree and The Work of Wolves