One Simple Thing

“One Simple Thing is fit to burst with grit, atmosphere, pathos and suspense. With his expertly paced second novel, Warren Read invites comparisons to the crime masters of the mid-twentieth century— guys like Chandler, and Thompson, and Willeford.”—JONATHAN EVISON

“Warren Read intertwines a coming-of-age story with Northwest noir and catapults both into satisfying new territory. Fans of Richard Ford will find much to appreciate and cheer in this lucid and beautifully written novel.”
—ADRIANNE HARUN, author of A Man Came out of a Door in the Mountain

“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 INCLAN, 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.”
—KENT MEYERS, bestselling author of Twisted Tree and The Work of Wolves

When his father abruptly leaves their small town in Wyoming, twelve-year-old Rodney Culver’s mother takes up with Otis Dell, a fry cook at the local diner—and a well-known petty thief. While Rodney resists the man’s infl uence at fi rst, Otis soon draws the boy into his small-time criminal world. After a simple heist goes violently wrong, Rodney becomes an unwitting fugitive, swept away from his mother to the primitive mountain sanctuary of the mysterious Lester Fanning. But with Lester’s skeptical lady friend, Nadine, in the way, and the town sheriff grappling with a curiously placed corpse, what once seemed like an easy plan quickly devolves into a knot of complications that ultimately threaten Rodney’s life. A tense story of misguided allegiances, One Simple Thing is the kind of “grit lit that belongs along such writers as Per Petterson, Richard Ford (Canada) and Charles Portis.

WARREN READ is the author of the 2017 novel, Ash Falls, which was called “a moody, haunting foray into rural Americana in the mold of Daniel Woodrell and Christian Kiefer,” by Kirkus. He is also of author of the memoir, The Lyncher in Me, about his discovery that his great-grandfather had taken part in a lynching. Warren earned his MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. He lives outside of Seattle.