The Amateurs [Abridged, Audiobook, CD] [Audio CD]

Marcus Sakey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 28, 2010

Alex is failing as a father. Ian keeps dangerous secrets. Jenn is pining for adventure; Mitch is pining for Jenn. Four friends just scraping by, finding comfort in each other and the hope that things will get better. But as their twenties fade in the rearview mirror, none of them are turning out to be who—or where—they hoped. In a time when CEOs steal millions while their employees watch savings dwindle, these four are tired of the honest approach. They’ve decided to stop waiting and start taking. But a supposedly victimless crime has become a bloody nightmare. People have been killed. Ruthless men pursue them. Tensions they thought were long-extinguished are flaring. As their world unravels, each will have to choose between their life and the lives of others. And for four people pushed to the ragged edge, the only thing more dangerous than the men chasing them might be their best friends.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Sakey's so-so thriller, four friends—travel agent Jenn Lacie, trader Ian Trevarian, hotel doorman Mitch McDonnell and bartender Alex Kern—meet every Thursday night at the Chicago restaurant where Alex bartends and commiserate over their unsatisfying lives. When Alex's boss, Johnny Love Loverin, asks him to act as muscle for a shady back-office deal, the group decides, almost on a whim, to steal Johnny's money. The heist goes smoothly until an altercation in the alley behind the bar leads to murder, and the four friends find themselves with $250,000 and a dead body. Making matters worse, Mitch and Jenn discover that the deal they interrupted wasn't about drugs or guns but something far more deadly. Sakey (Good People) does what he can with the weak premise, but his characters will elicit little sympathy from readers who won't care why the foursome carried out their poorly planned and executed scheme. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Marcus Sakey is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Blade Itself. He has shadowed homicide detectives, toured the morgue, interviewed soldiers, ridden with gang cops, and learned to pick a dead bolt in sixty seconds. Born in Flint, Michigan, he now lives in Chicago with his wife. Visit him online at MarcusSakey.com for contests, behind-the-scenes info, and excerpts of his work in progress.

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio on CD Value Priced (July 28, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1423367049
• ISBN-13: 978-1423367048
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 5 x 1.4 inches
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)

More About the Author

I'm a novelist, which means I make a living telling lies. Hopefully they keep you up at night or make you miss your train stop. My books have been named New York Time's Editor's Picks, selected among Esquire's Top 5 Novels of The Year, and optioned for film by Ben Affleck and Tobey Maguire.

Visit me at MarcusSakey.com, or follow me on Twitter (Twitter.com/MarcusSakey) or Facebook (Facebook.com/MarcusSakey)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From beginning to end, THE AMATEURS will haunt you like a ghost, September 14, 2009

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Amateurs (Hardcover)

Starting in 2007 with THE BLADE ITSELF, his debut novel, Marcus Sakey began building his own shelf in the bookcase with a series of independent works dealing with what occurs when bad things happen to believable characters. His fourth book not only continues to explore this line of thought, but takes it to new places, wherein he deftly juggles a complex quartet of characters who are so out of their depth that they're barely aware they're drowning. Everyone, quite ironically, gets what they want in THE AMATEURS. What Sakey really gets into here --- and he's very subtle in doing this --- is demonstrating that when you reach down into the pit and pull out that jewel you have lusted after, it's often wrapped in barbed wire that's hanging on to it as well.

THE AMATEURS begins with an introduction to a group of friends, four people who have gradually gravitated toward each other into an informal Thursday night drinking meetup at Rossi's, a Chicago bar and restaurant with pretensions for something more. Alex is a bartender there, a job in which he seems to be stuck even as his ex-wife has moved on to better things, taking their daughter with her while holding his unpaid child support obligation over his head. Mitch is seething internally, not only at the minor indignities he experiences each day on the job, but also with unrequited love for Jenn. A thirty-something, quietly hot travel agent who yearns for excitement beyond the vicarious enjoyment she receives from sending clients to exotic places, Jenn happens to be involved in a friends-with-privileges relationship with Alex. Ian, the fourth member of the group, is a broker who had beginner's luck early in his career but now seems to be on a "one and done" track, held back by his addiction to cocaine and distracted by his compulsion to gambling.

The opportunity to change everything for all four of them emerges when Johnny Love, the shady owner of Rossi's, offers Alex a side job to provide some quiet "muscle" for a business transaction that is to take place in a few days. Love has a reputation as a drug dealer, and Alex is aware that Love's safe is bursting with cash. The quartet quickly --- too quickly --- conceives of a plan to separate Love from his money. Each of them has his or her own reasons. Alex can catch up on his delinquent child support, which he believes will keep his wife from leaving. Ian is deeply in debt to some very bad people. Jenn is seeking a thrill. And Mitch? He has a mad-on for Love anyway, but he primarily wants to protect Jenn. So they devise, what seems to be on the surface, a good plan. And it almost immediately begins to fall apart.

One can sense that these folks are amateurs simply by the way Ian obtains the guns they use to pull off their planned heist. At first it doesn't look like a failure; in fact, everyone initially gets what they want. But they steal a lot more than money. And suddenly, they are in very big trouble, much worse than when they began. It would be bad enough if it was just Love looking for them, but the people who really want to find them make Love look like an amateur himself. As the group dynamic slowly and then quickly begins to change, it becomes obvious that none of them are going to make it out the other end without leaving some parts behind.

The climax is by turns better than you might expect and worse than you can imagine. One of the few characters left standing is too good to consign to limbo, so I would imagine we might be seeing him or her again in a future Sakey novel. THE AMATEURS is a cautionary tale that will keep you on the straight and narrow during the day and haunt your dreams for months to come. But it is more than an excellent thriller. It is a character study, one in which Sakey expertly explores the dynamics of a group of individuals under stress and how they react. From beginning to end, THE AMATEURS will haunt you like a ghost.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Decent fast paced thriller, November 26, 2009

By 

C. Shelnutt (JC, TN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Amateurs (Hardcover)

I really enjoyed Sakey's previous work "The Blade Itself", so I was looking forward to "The Amateurs", which tells the tale of four bored thiry-somethings that hang out on Thursday nights at a bar. None of the four is satisfied with where their lives are headed, so they impulsively plan a "can't fail" robbery. Of course, their plan fails drastically.

As a thriller and quick page turner, the book worked pretty well. The guy can definitely write. However, the ending went a little overboard in my opinion. If you haven't read "The Blade Itself", I'd read that instead of this one.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Book Club Review: Adults Who Act Like Teenagers and Cartoon Villains, June 14, 2011

By 

Claire McManus - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Amateurs (Hardcover)

Book Club Review

The Amateurs

Marcus Sakey

Our book club's book for June was THE AMATEURS, by Marcus Sakey. I wouldn't classify it so much as a "mystery" but rather as a "crime novel," or "novel of suspense."

The book follows four friends in Chicago: Alex the buff bartender; Mitch the doorman; Jenn the travel agent; and Ian the trader who's lost his edge and developed a drug habit. The owner of the restaurant at which Alex works is a seedy quasi-Underworld figure who asks Alex to serve as a sort of bodyguard/tough guy for some sort of deal that is going to happen in the back office. Alex sees a safe full of money, and the four friends hatch a plot: Why shouldn't they steal the money during the deal by bursting in and waving some guns around?

All of the characters have reasons for taking part in the crime. Alex is a divorced dad who can't make child-care payments, and his wife is now threatening to take his daughter away. Ian owes a lot of money to a guy who's going to break his legs if Ian doesn't pay him back soon. Jenn wants out of her dead-end job, and Mitch wants Jenn.

Without giving away the plot, something goes quite wrong during the heist, and it turns out that the "deal" was for something more dangerous and deadly than the drugs everyone thought would be changing hands. As the cops close in and the villains figure out who's responsible for the theft of a quarter of a million dollars, the four friends find themselves at each other's throats, and unexpected betrayals and alliances happen.

This was one of those books where we were able to pinpoint a fairly long list of both pros and cons. On the plus side, it is a fast read with decent (if not nail-biting) suspense. Sakey is a good writer, and the Chicago setting, we thought, was well done. In terms of entertainment, it kept most of us engaged and wanting to know what happened next, even though it was a bit predictable.

On the negative side, the characters - all of whom are adults - behave a lot like teenagers, which makes it hard to really like them or root for them. The two villains, who aren't even given full names, are straight out of Dick Dastardly cartoons. They do everything but tie the heroine to the train tracks as the train toots in the distance. The ending's both a downer and a little schlocky, and there's some strange bits of economic game theory thrown into the plot in the last few chapters that made a lot of us think "Huh?"

Overall, of the 12 people who took part in our discussion, 6 gave the book a thumbs up, and 6 gave it a thumbs down. The "thumbs ups" were not really enthusiastic but rather more along the lines of "an OK read, not bad, but not something to go out of your way to look for."

I personally thought it would make a decent TV movie but as a book it just didn't come together for me. And yet I have to say that Sakey is a good writer (we all agreed on that). So maybe this is just a case of a good writer with a not-very-good plot. God knows that happens a lot with well-known writers who phone in books featuring the same old series character(s).

This should really get 2 1/2 stars, because it's not, overall, good enough for three, but it's better than two. I'm erring on the side of 3 because it's so well written.