Real Easy

Real Easy is Marie Rutkoski’s 2022 adult literary thriller, a significant departure from the young adult fantasy and historical fiction that built her career. The novel is set in 1999 at the Lovely Lady, a strip club in suburban Chicago, and centers on the women who work there. Samantha is a single mother who has been dancing at the club for years and has built an uneasy stability around the work. Jolene is the new girl, eighteen years old and already realizing that the routine she walked into is more dangerous than the orientation suggested. When one of the dancers is murdered, Detective Holly Meylin is assigned to the case, and the investigation pulls in every woman at the club.

What distinguishes Real Easy from a lot of crime fiction set in adjacent worlds is Rutkoski’s refusal to flatten the dancers into either victims or sex workers as a category. The women at the Lovely Lady are individuals with histories, motives, defenses, friendships, and contradictions. The procedural plot proceeds on its own terms while Rutkoski uses the rotating perspectives to build a portrait of a specific workplace, a specific community, and a specific corner of late twentieth century America.

The prose is sharp and compressed. Rutkoski has spent her career writing for young adult readers and the discipline shows in how much she conveys with how few words. The 1999 setting is rendered with attention to specific cultural detail without becoming a period piece. And the central murder mystery is handled with care, with a resolution that lands earned rather than cheap.

For readers who came to Rutkoski through the Winner’s trilogy or the Forgotten Gods series, Real Easy is a bracing change of pace. For new readers, it is a strong introduction to her adult work and to one of the more interesting recent thrillers about the lives of working women in adjacent industries.