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The Amateurs
Chicago novelist Sakey has made a name for himself with a series of thrillers—Good People, The Blade Itself—and has racked up a series of accolades to make elder authors drool (including Tobey Maguire and Ben Affleck optioning film rights to two of his books). Outside the acclaim, what interests most about Sakey is that all four of his books now have been stand-alone stories. While crime fiction tilts so heavily toward series and recurring heros and heroines, Sakey leans the other way, cutting stories from single swaths of cloth.
His latest, The Amateurs, follows four thirtysomething friends who meet every Thursday evening for drinks at a Lincoln Park joint where one of them, Alex, bartends. When the sketchy restaurant owner asks Alex to serve as muscle in a shady deal, the four decide to pay him back by stealing his cash. The titular amateurs, though, don’t get it right and end up with a dead body and some big-time crooks in pursuit.
As in his previous books, Sakey is interested in what pushes “good” or at least ambivalent people to commit a crime. He allows his characters to believe their circumstances create moral vacuums for their actions—as in Good People, where a couple steal money to ease the financial strain on their marriage. Trouble is, those vacuums eventually collapse. But in The Amateurs, the circumstances aren’t quite so dire or intimate; it’s mostly thirtysomething malaise that gives the four friends the itch to become baddies. That’s no small force, but it’s no impetus for empathy, either.
Part of the allure of Sakey’s one-and-done style is that he can’t rest on familiarity, and he clearly enjoys building a completely new set of characters. At this point, Sakey’s a pro with the pacing, but his exploration of morality could still use a little seasoning.
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