You're As Good As Dead by E.A. Aymar

You're As Good As Dead Reviews

• 
  Joe

  A good read
  
  I got confused, reading books one and two, the same hero or main character, but his outlook changed as people died around him. The author is good and I wonder if the story could be told differently. I would read it again and may do that.
• 
  Kathleen

  If you like your violent crime with a side of humor, this is the book for you! The complicated, conflicted protagonist—a college professor and father who has fallen in with a bad element—struggles to save himself and his daughter, while trying to decide what kind of man he is. It's a wild ride!
• 
  Mary Overton

  Ed Aymar’s new thriller passes the first-page-test … that crucial opening needed to hook the reader:
  “On a cold afternoon in October, Mack bites down on a potato chip and his forehead explodes.
  “It’s been quiet in Mack’s Guns and Gifts until that moment. I’d dropped off my monthly extortion payment while Mack watched the Baltimore Ravens ….”
  The story continues in that same voice - grimly funny, self-deprecating, a bit too innocent for the dark freak-show of a world into which he’s plunged. The unexpected happens when a community college lit professor alternates class discussions on Hemingway with his new hobby of avoiding criminal assassins and their bullets.
• 
  Amanda

  I liked the use of changing perspectives without revealing too much or too little information. But for me the book felt slow and long, when I know it was in fact short.
  
  Trigger warnings: violence, torture, murder, infidelity
  
  Check out my
  full review. (Link will be lie August 17, 2021).
  
  *I received a free copy of this book from the author in exchange for my honest review.*
• 
  Jennifer Bort

  Tom Starks is a guy badly in need of a plan. Some self-awareness, a touch of impulse control, and a parenting class or two wouldn’t hurt him either. But the junior college English lit professor perpetually on the verge of getting himself and all his remaining loved ones killed who serves as protagonist of E. A. Aymar’s Dead Trilogy makes us care enough to keep turning the pages to find out how he and they will manage to stay alive this time.
  
  If you haven’t yet read I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, the first book in the trilogy, you’ll want to do that before cracking open You’re as Good as Dead. In Sleep, we’re introduced to Tom, his wife Renee, whose brutal and inexplicable murder initiates all the action in the trilogy, and Renee’s daughter Julie, for whom Tom makes lurching, half-hearted attempts to serve as a father. When Tom finds he’s incapable of pulling the trigger to kill the man at first convicted of Renee’s murder and then set free, he goes in search of hired help. That’s when his problems really start.
  
  You’re as Good as Dead picks up as Tom is stopping by the gun store to pay his monthly installment of extortion money to Mack, the guy with whom he has ended up negotiating a bizarre live-and-let-live truce at the end of Book One. It’s poor timing on Tom’s part, since that’s the moment an opposing crime boss has chosen to have Mack whacked. In no time, Tom is in serious trouble with two crime families, the FBI, and angry adolescent daughter Julie.
  
  While Tom narrates all of Sleep, several characters take turns narrating Good, a device that offers greater narrative flexibility and adds to the tension as we cut from person to person. Aymar has populated his book with a cast of sharply drawn supporting characters. In particular, Daniel, the crime boss’s drug-addled errand boy who prays that he’s not expected to kill anyone, and Lucy, the steady, almost-rational half of a set of killer twins, are especially compelling. Both offer an interesting contrast to Tom’s moral relativism. When Lucy says she would never harm a child, you believe her, and she seems far more capable of keeping Julie safe than Tom does.
  
  Both books feature a wise-guy tone and droll sense of humor, such as when even the axe-wielding killer-for-hire in Sleep disses Tom for being just a community college teacher. The scenes of Tom teaching classic novels to his English lit class are humorously surreal given the surrounding action, but it’s hard to beat the exchange at the end of Sleep when Mack and Tom negotiate into which area of Tom’s body Mack is going to pump a bullet so that they’ll be even.
  
  It’s a nice touch that the novels we see Tom teaching to his class offer a parallel theme to the book at hand. In Sleep, it is The Count of Monte Cristo, with its study of the cost of vengeance; in Good, it is For Whom the Bell Tolls.
  
  The end of You’re as Good as Dead sets up the problem that Tom and Julie will have to face in Book Three of the trilogy, which is their status as a loose end that needs to be tidied up. Can’t wait to see how Tom manages to permanently extricate himself and his family from all the factions who so clearly want them dead.
  
• 
  Colleen Shogan

  I'm a big mystery reader but don't normally read noir or thrillers. I thoroughly enjoyed "You're As Good As Dead." The main character isn't a hero. I find that refreshing. Real life is often ambiguous and actual people are not good or bad - they are usually something in between. Aymar knows this and writes his main character from that perspective. He also accomplishes the difficult task of writing from different points of view, which isn't easy to accomplish as a fiction writer. Furthermore, I hadn't read the first book in the series, but had no trouble following "You're As Good As Dead." The writing was very straightforward, with just enough description but not too much to slow down the action. I definitely recommend this book.
• 
  Serge

  (Free copy received courtesy of the author & Goodreads) This is a second book in a trilogy, and I hadn't read the first. The approach to extreme crime and violence in the story is almost comic-book like, with very brief images and shifting narrators, and overall, I did not find it that pleasant. The main narrator (hero would be a stretch) is a self-absorbed, morally bankrupt single father, and while such a character could be very interesting, it doesn't happen in this book.
• 
  Mark Petry

  I really liked this book. The story never slows down. It held my attention all the way to the exciting end. I like the humor as well. A great thriller!
• 
  Laura Ellen

  Aymar's lines, man. They slay me. Plus, Baltimore? What else do you want in a noir? Can't wait for book 3. Nervous laughter.
• 
  J.J. Hensley

  I absolutely loved the style of this book. Aymar does a fantastic job with keeping the reader interested by shifting the points of view at just the right time.