Sakey's Brilliance Saga Slumps with A Better World

A Better World - Marcus Sakey

When we last saw Nick Cooper (“Just ‘Cooper,’ please”…) he’d tossed his job. To be more accurate, he tossed his boss – off the roof of a 12-story building. The guy deserved it, though, and so Cooper’s been rewarded with a new job: he’s a special advisor to the President. The country’s a mess, though, and the situation in the Oval Office isn’t a whole lot better.

Out in flyover-land, Cleveland to be exact, Ethan Park and his family had finally become accustomed to suburban life when “The Children of Darwin” cut that city (and two others) off from the rest of the country. First there were empty shelves in the groceries, and then the power went off. And finally, the mistake by the lake was quarantined by armed soldiers.  Cooper knew from analyzing the patterns – his special gift – that this was all part of a plan, a plan that he’d been tricked into setting in motion. Not only did he set it in motion, but by doing so he made the mastermind untouchable. Cooper could sense what was coming, and knew that it ain’t gonna be pretty. Can you say “civil war”? A war between “normal” and “abnormals”? Well, that’s what he saw coming…

There's Just One Word to Describe Marcus Sakey's Brilliance: "Brilliant!"

Nick Cooper – just “Cooper” to his friends – might be considered a traitor to his kind. His kind is the gifted, also known as brilliants, abnorms, twists, freaks… the small segment of humanity born with special abilities. Not X-Man powers like teleportation or pyrokinesis, though: just a little tweak to the brain that makes them much, much, much better at one thing than “normal” people. Imagine an NFL running back who can see where the defense will be in two seconds instead of where they are now; or a savant who can predict to the microsecond when any stock will rise or fall. Get the picture?

Cooper’s gift is pattern recognition. He can look at a person’s face and instinctively know what they’ll do; what they’ll say. He can even look at a person’s cell phone bill or credit card charges and figure out precisely where they’ll be tomorrow. That ability makes him invaluable to his employer; the government agency charged with fighting a “silent” war against abnorm terrorists, terrorists like John Smith. For a decade, Smith has been killing innocent civilians and, for a decade, “Equitable Services” and Cooper have been on his trail.

That’s about to change: in a desperate move, Cooper goes underground, into the giant Wyoming compound of the abnorms. His cover story? He triggered a terrorist bomb that killed over a thousand; and now his old unit is on his trail – and they’ll shoot first and ask questions later.

What Cooper learns inside that compound, however, will change his life…

Dead Again? "The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes"

The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes - Marcus Sakey

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...

Marcus Sakey, "The Amateurs": This is a Job for Professionals

The Amateurs by Marcus Sakey

Imagine that you’re thirty-something, stuck in a dead-end job, and not one of the lofty dreams of youth has come true. If someone came to you and proposed a scheme that could change your life, what would your answer be? Even if it meant breaking the law? The Thursday Night Drinking Club answered, “Yes.”

The Club is Alex, a bartender; Mitch, invisible doorman at a swanky hotel; Jenn, a travel agent (do they even still have those in the era of the internet?); and Ian, the club’s one semi-success – a trader who hasn’t grabbed the brass ring in years. Every Thursday the friends meet at the restaurant where Alex tends bar; meet perhaps mostly because misery loves company. Their favorite drinking game is one they call “Ready-Go”; basically a form of “what if?” When one night Alex’s question is, “What would you do if you had a share of a quarter-million dollars?” the question is more pertinent than most: Alex knows where there is a quarter mil just ready to be picked up. The problem is that to get the money, the four will have to steal it. That should be no problem: they’re smarter than the average crook, after all. And so a pact is made, a foolproof plan is formed, and the Thursday Night Drinking Club set themselves up to embark on a life of crime.

Bobbie Burns was right: even the best-laid plans often go awry.

Everything begins according to plan, but then things begin to go wrong. Not just a little wrong, but horribly wrong – and a man lying dead in the alley behind the restaurant isn’t even the worst of their problems. You see, the friends may be smart, but they are definitely amateurs and they make an amateur mistake: they don’t realize who they’re dealing with. And the four are dealing with people who are a lot, lot worse then they’d ever expected…

Chicago author Marcus Sakey seems to be building a literary career out of “what if” scenarios himself. The Amateurs begins slowly, seeming at first glance little more than a by-the-numbers thriller with the quartet of amateur crooks caught in the inevitable squeeze between the cops investigating a crime and real crooks wanting their booty back. If that were the case, the plot of The Amateurs would play out with but slight differences from Sakey’s previous novel, Good People. That was, in fact, my first impression of the novel. In the earlier tale, however, Tom and Anna Reed (the titular “good” people) find themselves forced to make tough decisions that will affect their lives. The four friends in The Amateurs find themselves in much, much deeper doodoo. What the four of them do, what the four of them decide, will affect their lives and the lives of those they love – and that’s only for starters: what the four of them finally do, what the four of them finally decide, will effect millions of lives.

In that, Marcus Sakey has raised his new novel far beyond some simple by-the-numbers thriller – not that The Amateurs isn’t a first-rate thriller, because it certainly is. More than just write a crime novel, however, Sakey has crafted a study into the psychology of how ordinary people react under extraordinary circumstances. The Amateurs goes even further: it is ultimately a study of how a seemingly ordinary person can give his life meaning.