The naked man regained consciousness on a rocky beach, half-frozen; barely aware that he was human. He warmed himself in a car he found nearby; a luxury BMW registered to someone named Daniel Hayes, from Malibu, California. It was then that he realized he did not know who or where he was...
...yet once he'd checked into a cheap motel, he seemed to know exactly when "Candy Girls" would air on FX - and that the pretty brunette playing Emily was someone he ached for. In narrowly escaping a local Barney Fife, he discovered he had awakened in Maine, he was the Daniel Hayes who owned the car, and cops nationwide were on the lookout for him and the silver Beemer. He just didn't know why...
...until he'd returned to LA, where he discovered that he was "a person of interest" in the disappearance and probable death of Laney Thayer, the actress from the corny TV show who had so entranced him - and also his wife. Could there possibly be a more inconvenient time to come down with a case of amnesia?
That moment on the beach was resurrection from the first of The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes, which was immediately followed by life on the run, all the while convinced to his soul that he would never have hurt Laney Thayer. What a memory-challenged Daniel Hayes could not know was that he was due for another life -- and death. Whether his next life would be in hell or in heaven depended on a man named Bennett and a woman called Belinda Nichols. When the three of them connected, everything changed.
Marcus Sakey is making a living - a good one, I certainly hope - out of novels that feature ordinary folks who, through no fault of their own, find themselves face-to-face with a psychopath. Or perhaps a sociopath - Bennett himself thinks he's closer to a sociopath: "A psychopath is in it for the fun. I don't get off on hurting people. I'm just willing to do it for money." Whichever one the guy may be, he's not the sort of person any of us would want to meet in a dark alley; and he's also someone whose attention it's definitely best not to attract. He's not that different from Jack Witkowski, the villain in Sakey's Good People (2006), in truth. Neither one of them is nice, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Whatever the case, Sakey's heroes find themselves struggling with a man who seems to have no scruples and no morals, someone ready and willing to do whatever it takes to get his payoff. Blackmail is Bennett's business, and he seems to have life-destroying dirt on just about everybody. Unfortunately, he's as cunning as he is cruel - sly enough to stay a step and a half ahead of his victims at every turn. Implacable, apparently unbeatable, the man called Bennett is Daniel Hayes' worst nightmare - or would be, if Hayes could just remember him. He might have some help in that department, however...
The theme of helpless lambs cowering before a ravening wolf runs through The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes, much as the same theme drove the plot of Good People. Like the ordinary yuppie couple of Sakey's earlier novel, the fates have thrust Daniel Hayes and his companion into circumstances for which their previous, pampered lives could not possibly have prepared them - circumstances for which few of us are prepared. By combining that sense of "everyman against impossible odds" with a plot that crackles with tension, and Marcus Sakey's written us another winner.
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