Good People

Good People is a thriller novel by Marcus Sakey about a rich, liberal couple living beyond their means in Chicago as landlords after a number of expensive, failed fertility treatments. The couple lives above their tenants, and are thrust into a strange chase by murderous thugs when they find their tenant dead in his apartment with four hundred thousand dollars in cash laying next to him and decide to take the money. The book is a funny, surprising thriller in which the supposed “good people” of the title are just as immoral as the bad guys.

Tom and Anna Reed, a young, mostly unhappy couple, feel cheated out of their happy family when they can't conceive a child. They are working and have a rental property that they use to help them pay their expenses, but they are living well beyond their means trying to conceive a child. Anna undergoes four failed in-vitro fertilization treatments, costing tens of thousands of dollars each, before they give up and stare down their immense debt. Though once happy together, the emotional and financial toll of their infertility weighs upon them both, and they feel resentful of each other and the world.

One day, Anna and Tom are drawn into their hermit-like tenant's unit when his smoke detector goes off, and nobody turns off the shrieking alarm. They find the man, whose checks for his unit were the only thing keeping them from going bankrupt, dead in his flat. Even more surprising than his sudden death, however, is the four hundred thousand dollars in cash they find stashed in his kitchen. Unsure what to do and desperate to pay off their consuming debt, they decide to take the cash and pray that nobody suspects them if the police come knocking.



Unfortunately for Tom and Anna, their tenant was not as mysterious or as antisocial as they had assumed. Rather than saving up his pennies to accrue his massive fortune, their tenant had been ensnared in an illegal drug operation, and the money had been stolen from a world-famous movie star who had come to Chicago to shoot a film and looking for the most exciting new drugs. The tenant was part of a gang of criminals who stole the money from the movie star; neither the gang nor the star is about to let their fortune be swiped from under their noses.

The first night with the money isn't so bad – Anna takes a day off work and pays the huge number of credit card bills the couple had amassed through their fertility treatments. They go out on a date, the first in a long time, and have some great, celebratory sex. However, before long, the gangsters come knocking, and Anna and Tom find themselves in much hotter water than they had ever imagined possible.

Their first problem is the leader of the tenant's gang, who shows up looking for the money that he helped the tenant steal. He brings with him a gang of violent criminals, all of whom helped orchestrate the heist and want their part of the cash. They aren't the only ones upset, though – the drug dealer who gave the gang the drugs to sell in the first place wants his money back, thinking that he is the one who deserves that four hundred thousand. This drug dealer, one of the most powerful men in Chicago,  threatens to make life especially challenging for the Reeds. Finally, the couple is being watched closely by a down-on-his-luck policeman, who is determined to connect the couple not only to the heist but also the death of their tenant. However, in the nature of the truly delusional, the Reeds' don't decide to fess up to the police in exchange for their own protection. Instead, they try to outsmart both the criminal element and the law in order to continue living their idyllic, debt-free life – though it doesn't look exactly as they had imagined it would.



Marcus Sakey is a Chicago resident and the author of a number of blue-collar crime novels set on the South Side of Chicago. He has written over a dozen books, many of which have been made into feature-length films. Some of his titles include The Blade Itself, At the City's Edge, Afterlife, and the Brilliance Trilogy, which includes Brilliance, A Better World, andWritten in Fire. A number of his books have sold over a million copies. Good People was also made into a feature film in 2013.