Anyway, there was Michael to think about. Jason turned right, digging for the keys to the Caddy. Forget the police. He had to check on his brother, just to be sure. No way this had anything to do with Michael—you could take the boy out of the choir, but never the reverse—but no harm in being certain. They'd probably share a laugh about the absurdity of the thing, a gangbanger tying to hijack him. But Jason doubted he'd ever know what it had really been about.
He was wrong.
GOOD PEOPLE
An irresistible temptation.
A split-second choice.
A dangerous decision.
A family, and the security to enjoy it: that’s all Tom and Anna Reed ever wanted. But years of infertility treatments, including four failed attempts at in vitro fertilization, have left them with neither. The emotional and financial costs are straining their marriage and endangering their dreams.
Then one night everything changes. Offered a chance at a future they'd almost lost hope in, they seize it. One simple choice. A fairy tale ending.
But Tom and Anna soon realize that fairy tales never come cheap. Because their decision puts them square in the path of ruthless men. Men who've been double-crossed, and who won’t stop until they get revenge.
No matter where they find it.
"Gleefully dread-filled, mercilessly tense, and moves with the speed of something
fired from a sawed-off. Based on his first three novels, one can't help but feel
Marcus Sakey is exactly the electric jolt American crime fiction needs."
Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River
"Sakey creates a moral dilemma fit for an advanced ethics class...I felt the
protagonists' pain to the point of flinching."
Chicago Sun-Times
"A terrific read...Sakey's best book yet."
Chicago Tribune
Excerpt from Good People , Copyright 2008, Dutton
Available as an e-book or wherever books are sold
When the smoke alarm started shrieking, Tom was reading in the den again, and again she was locked in the bedroom. Same house, different worlds. They both had their escapes.
The suddenness of the alarm made him swing his feet off the desk, the chair rocking forward as he did. It was a sound he associated with cooking more than anything else — Anna was a great chef, but their ventilation was for shit, and whenever she pan-seared something, she ended up smoking them out of the kitchen and setting off the alarm.
But tonight’s dinner had been cans of Campbell’s nuked and eaten separately. The remnants of his beef stew were cold in the bowl, alongside a novel, the spine cracked so the book laid flat.
Once the panic faded, he realized that the sound was different, muted. Like it was coming through walls, he thought, and on the heels of that, realized that it must be from their tenant’s apartment. The ventilation on the first floor wasn’t any better than theirs.
Tom sat back down, pinching the bridge of his nose. Muted or not, the screech wasn’t helping his headache. One of those lingering mothers that hung behind his eyeballs. When he moved them, it felt like something tugging at his optic nerve, a cold nauseous ache that made him want to close his eyes. While he was at it, open them to find himself somewhere else. Somewhere warm, with a soft breeze and a hammock. Maybe the smell of the ocean. Sometimes he pictured Anna with him, lying against him: The old Anna, the old him, fresh and in love, before their dreams became a burden. Sometimes he didn’t.
He sighed, took a sip of bourbon, and turned back to his book, a novel about twenty-something American expatriates living in Budapest. They were looking for themselves, and for their fortune, and they were beautiful, and so heartbreakingly young it hurt to read not because Tom couldn’t believe he had ever been that age but because he couldn’t believe he wasn’t still. In that secret center that he thought of as himself, he was in his mid-twenties, astride the intersection of freedom and responsibility. Old enough to know who he was and what he wanted, but young enough he didn’t owe anybody or need to get up twice a night to take a leak. A good age.
He planted elbows on either side of the book and rubbed sore eyes. Mid-twenties…D.C., the apartment in Adams Morgan, a second-floor unit above a bar-and-grill. He’d still been harboring dreams of being a novelist, worked in the evenings to the smell of hamburgers drifting in the open window. Anna had her own place, but slept at his most of the time. They’d thrown a Halloween party one year, and she’d gone as an abstract painting, naked except for a flesh-colored bikini and swirls of fluorescent body paint. When they’d made love that night, the paint smeared the sheets with flowers, and she’d laughed about it, thrown her head back and laughed that good laugh, then wrapped her painted arms around his back and rubbed color onto him.