'Not a bad way to pass an afternoon'
Good People
By Marcus Sakey, Dutton, 2008, 282 pp.
Marcus Sakey sets his new book — he's the author of the widely praised The Blade Itself — once again in his beloved Chicago. And, like its two predecessors, Good People is a primer on what's really good and what might be better in Sakey's work, as the author finds his voice in the wildly popular crime thriller genre.
The book is taut and violent, gaining momentum with each page, a book in which a handful of "good people" are brought together by the $400,000 taken from an exclusive Chicago nightspot.
Jack Witkowski, the mastermind behind the robbery, knows that the famous star who uses the money to support a drug habit will never report the theft. But Jack's brother Bobby and the star's bodyguard are killed. Then, the money disappears.
Tom and Anna Reed are comfortably on their way to the financial security. It's just that recently infertility treatments have taken both an emotional and financial toll on their dreams. When the man renting their downstairs rooms dies in his sleep, they discover $400,000 stashed in his kitchen. Convincing themselves that their former tenant was an eccentric recluse, Tom and Anna keep the money. After all, they decide, fate has led them to it; no one else can possibly know about it.
The Chicago police force is still desperate to solve the high profile Shooting Star robbery/murder when police detective Christopher Halden shows up at the Reed home. Halden eventually suspects the Reeds know more about the money than they have revealed. Besides, the money entices him, too, for it can help him retire much sooner than he has planned.
It's all pretty convoluted, the way a good, tense thriller ought to be. In such books, a lot can be forgiven—too many stock characters, too familiar a plot, too much happenstance—if the author's primary purpose is to make us sweat.
But if he intends to be Richard Price or Dennis Lehane, that author had better employ something more than selfish characters in a plot lifted directly from Scott Smith's A Simple Plan (a much wiser and more unsettling novel) with a fairy-tale finale.
Good People is not a bad way to pass an afternoon. It's just not quite the cautionary tale of corruption Sakey seems to have intended.
Steven Whitton is a Professor of English at Jacksonville State University.
