Customer Reviews

The Amateurs

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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

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.

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.

This book was like a train wreck in some ways. I only wanted to finish it so I could confirm I knew what was going to happen. The latter 2/3 is so transparent. In fact, if you read the jacket, you will have a fairly good idea of the entire book after the first few chapters. The problem is that, although the protagonists are amateurs, they were not collectively so stupid as to behave in such obviously catastrophic ways. The author constantly broke my suspension from reality. I found myself yelling out loud to my wife nearby, "oh my god!" it would just never happen that way. Think bad Bruce Willis movie. Light, action, predictable, can walk out of the room (or skim some paragraphs, which I did), and not miss a beat.

I would normally not write a review, but no one warned me as there are mostly 4- and 5-stars here.
In my opinion, those reviewers have a very low threshold for quality thrillers.

I've read the editorial reviews. The plot is implausible, they say. The characters are just too dumb, they say. Well, okay. Hitchcock said that the first casualty of movie-making is logic. That's gotta be true of crime novels, too. So stipulated: The things that happen in this book? They would never really happen.

And yet there's something about these people. I got to know them in a way that is unusual for a crime novel. So I kind of believed that they were flawed enough, discouraged enough, off-kilter enough to do the the idiotic things they did. And then I started to think: Maybe we're all just one stupid idea away from getting ourselves in so deep we can never climb back out.

Ah, Mitch! You're such a schmoe! But I feel for you.

If you haven't heard of Marcus Sakey yet, you will soon! Three of his four novels have already been optioned for movies. The Blade Itself: A Novel had its rights picked up by Ben Affleck's production company and the movie will star Chris Pine from Star Trek (Single-Disc Edition). Actor Tobey Maguire bought the rights to Good People.

"The Amateurs" is my first read (but not last) of Marcus Sakey. I finally decided to take the plunge after hearing over and over again about his smash debut novel "The Blade Itself" and reading one of his short stories (The Desert Here and the Desert Far Away) from the short story thriller anthology Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can't Put Down: Through a Veil Darkly\Ghost Writer\A Calculated Risk\Remaking\The Weapon.

The book is a serious page turner and a very realistic story. Four friends Jenn, Ian, Mitch and Alex come up with a plan that will change their lives forever. Of course much like in the real world, nothing ever goes as planned and nothing is ever as simple as it may have seemed.

The characters make this book, they are each perfect in every way for the story. If Sakey had written the characters poorly, this novel would be a flop, lucky for us he nailed it. Getting to know the characters as you read and watching them change after "the big event" is really outstanding.

This book is a true thriller! Great writing, great characters and a great plot!

Highly, highly recommended!

Enjoy~

** Not only is Marcus Sakey a great writer, he's a good guy. To find him at his website, just search his name online and you'll see as I did that he's a very reader friendly author.

Here was a book I could not put down...literally. Great story...intense plot...Highly recommended! This is Marcus Sakey's best book...so far!

If this were the first Sakey book I had read perhaps I would have given it more than three stars, but it is'nt. My first Sakey book was "Good People" and I could not put it down. I was so impressed I went right to reading "The Blade Itself" and that's when I realized Sakey has a formula that he follows and it is the same for each book, including this one. I understand why not fixing something that is'nt broken usually works, but after reading the third Sakey novel with the same plot line, I decided that maybe he needs to shake it up a bit. He gets alot of praise for being the next big deal in crime fiction, but I have discovered other authors in this same genre that I prefer and that do a much better job. A Sakey novel reads like a screenplay,and I guess he has sold his books for future movies. In "The Amateurs" we find four normal, everyday people put into extraordinary circumstances. They have a plan to rob Alex's boss since all four friends either need the money for various reasons or just want to shake things up a bit. Of course the plan goes off the rails, and unforseen things happen. Bad men(real criminals) get involved, and things get scary. The four friends now wish they had not taken their life for granted, suddenly they realize things were'nt so bad after all now that they are faced with death. This is the same plot in both Sakey's other two books I mentioned. He always uses regular people, tempts them with something, they decide to commit criminal acts and then the plan backfires, causing a lot of action scenes. Scary bad guys come into the picture and viola, we have a real mess on our hands. One thing about "The Amateurs" is that it does end a bit differently, but the last few pages go into cheesefest territory. I won't give the ending away, but each of the four friends has a real shining moment, sacrifices are made, heroes are everywhere, lives are flashing in front of eyes, the meaning to life is made clear,and angels are singing. Ok, maybe not the angels, but Sakey really lays it on thick with the desperate attempt at bringing meaning to the story, but it is a failed attempt and very cliched. The authors I recently discovered that do this genre better are Sean Doolittle and Linwood Barclay. Happy reading.

Four friends have devised the perfect plan. Jenn is yearning for adventure, Ian has an eye for the dangerous, Alex just found out his ex-wife is moving far away and taking their daughter, and Mitch is sick of being completely predictable. When Alex finds a couple hundred dollars in his bosses safe, he and his friends joke about taking the money. Then, the joke starts to sound like an incredibly good idea. The guy they're ripping off has a history of being ruthless. Will these four friends find out how ruthless or will these four normal seeming, clean record, upstanding citizens perform the perfect theft?

WOW!! Yeah, all caps, it's like that! This book was amazing. I felt like I was part of the robbery. I highly recommend this book. What are you waiting for? Order it now:)

[...]

The Thursday Night Drinking Club that met at Rossi's each week consisted of four friends. Mitch is the loveable loser. He has absolutely no backbone and wouldn't stand up for himself against anyone. Ian is the closet druggie and gambler. He's facing some serious hurt if he doesn't pay his gambling debts. Alex is the divorced father. Working as a bar tender he hasn't been able to keep up with his child support payments and his ex-wife is threatening to take his daughter out of state. Jenn is the only girl in the group. She's secretly sleeping with one of the guys and yearns for more adventure in life.

Playing the game of "What would you do with a million dollars?" one night gets them all thinking about an easy score when Alex mentions to his friends that his boss left a lot of cash in the office safe.

But when the easy score turns into murder, their ho-hum lives are turned upside down in the split second it takes to pull the trigger and the once close friends can no longer trust each other.

Seriously guys, this book was incredible and may have just taken the crown from Saints in Limbo as my favorite book this year.

The friends are each kind of damaged in their own way but they all step up when faced with the terrible consequences of their actions. My favorite character of the four is Mitch. I adored him for both his door mat self in the beginning and what he became after the robbery. The ending was a complete shock but plays well with the storyline. Really the whole book is genius and I can't really say too much more without giving away some of the plot.

You have to trust me on this one and pick up your own copy today. This was my first book by Sakey but from his website I see that he has plenty more to offer that I can't wait to read. I also saw that three of his previous novels were optioned for movies. I hope The Amateurs makes it to the big screen also. This is a must read for suspense and thriller lovers.