If time has been on anyone’s side for the past two years, author Marcus Sakey is our best bet. After meeting outstanding reviews from literary crime fiction’s largest critics with 2007’s “The Blade Itself, ” Sakey has yet again sent his critics on parade with his latest contribution to the genre. Recounting a young married couple’s ascent into an obscene amount of money that places them at a stand-off between time, each other and, not to mention, some of Chicago’s most astute criminals, Sakey’s “Good People” boasts a surreal brush with financial fate gone entirely wrong and relinquishes a series of close encounters with the law and, better yet, his protagonists’ own demise. But Sakey has set a pace for the work, which generates a magnetically horrifying effect on this fiction from all standpoints—ours included. Just as Tom and Anna Reed are dragged from their monotonous existence by a lump sum of cash, they are immediately tailed by one that is both more turbulent and more persistent and are left with only each other and their hopes of reestablishing normalcy. Before long, our familiar “Sweet Home Chicago,” despite genuine description, exchanges its trademark quaintness for modulated indifference to the characters’ predicament, and Sakey accomplishes this well. Chicago’s trademark flair becomes daunting: Navy Pier’s Ferris wheel—the city’s second hand; Lake Shore Drive—a continuous funeral procession for the passing of the future into the past. Merely midway through the novel, the desire to reach the story’s conclusion makes page-turning a slightly terrifying endeavor. (Elise Biggers)
“Good People,” Marcus Sakey, Dutton, 323 pages, $24.95
The Mother of Good Luck: A Review of Dream Books and Gamblers Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach takes us to Great Migration-era Chicago. When southern Blacks transplanted to Chicago, fleeing Jim Crow, they first landed and were crowded into the Bronzeville neighborhood. Soon after an informal market of illegal lotteries referred to as “policy” sprung up. Schlabach’s particular focus is Black womanhood in this policy industry.
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