Step to the Graveyard Easy

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: All his life Matthew Cape has been considered a good person, a kind and honest man whom works hard and is faithful to his wife. In the middle of a day, his world is turned upside down when Anna walks into her bedroom and sees Matt with another woman. After Anna confronts him and leaves Matt packs up and leaves home for parts unknown.

He travels all over the country seeing new places and enjoying the wild side of life. In San Francisco, con artists Tanya and Boone Judson take him in but Matt manages to turn the tables on them and regains his money. Though something Judsons let slip and through photographs, Matt travels to Lake Tahoe where he comes in contact with true evil and takes a stand that will either mean his salvation or his damnation.

This novel is neither pretty nor neat but it is an honest reflection of the human condition. Bill Pronzini, author of the famous Nameless Detective series, lays bare the soul of his protagonist in such a way that readers will come to accept his choices he made. STEP TO THE GRAVEYARD EASY is literary noir that is dark, brooding and very haunting, a book that the audience will long remember.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: Outstanding book from the very start to the last word. I think it is Pronzini's best since A Wasteland Of Strangers.

Rating:
Summary: Step to the Graveyard Easy
Review: The old pro (pronzini) did it again. I did not like Matt Cape
and for the most part I was glad that this was a short book. But the last chapter changed everything. Including how I rated this book. (before the final chapter I was going to rate this book a 3) I have been a fan of Bill Pronzini for over 20 years and this is far from one of his best. Read Blue Lonesome or Wastland for Strangers if you want to see him at the top of his game.

Rating:
Summary: Superb!
Review: When I started Steps To The Graveyard Easy, I was unsympathetic to the protagonist Matt Cape. He was a man with a stable family, good job, and someone well thought of by most people. He purposely turns all of this upside down and abandons everything and everyone to ostensibly find true "freedom" by heading for the open road. But was this his real motive for giving up everything? Along the way, Pronzini paints a picture of Cape that seems to stretch one's thoughts about him and his actions to the point of being unbelieveable. But, that's the genius of Pronzini's writing and one soon finds great empathy and positive feelings for Matt as the meanings of his actions become known.

While not as long as King's The Stand or as broad in scope as Long's The Descent, this is a book that feels like it and if it were any longer would be superfluous.

This is a suspensful story with a good plot and with chartacters that are completely believable. This book has several moral dilemmas, along with a great murder/mystery, that are resolved quite nicely and the twist ending begs the question "What would you do?"