Good People

By: Marcus Sakey

Narrated by: Joyce Bean, Dan John Miller

The $400,000 would take care of the mortgage payments that are starting to back up on Tom and Anna Reed. It would cover the credit-card debt they can't get out from under. It would help them find a way to have the child they desperately want but can't seem to conceive. It is more money than either of them has ever seen in one place, and they have no idea what it's doing in their house.

But wherever it came from, it is clear what the money could do for them if they kept it. What Tom and Anna can't imagine in this single, defining moment is that nothing comes for free.

Before the week is over, they'll know exactly where that $400,000 came from - and come face to face with the brutal truth that in order to save your own life, sometimes you have no choice but to destroy your dreams forever.

©2008 Marcus Sakey (P)2008 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

What were the producers thinking?

I listen to audiobooks all the time. Perhaps I have been lucky, because I had never encountered this: a man reads the male parts of the story and a woman reads the female parts even within the same paragraph!!!! (I have seen other books where a male will read one chapter and a female another, like in Gone Girl. This is different -- the woman would read her one line of dialogue, for example, in the middle of a description read by the male reader). Incredibly distracting. Plus, their voices -- while both OK by themselves -- did not match each other.

I wonder if they recorded the entire book with the male reader and then found that his rendition of the female lines was not good? Whatever the reason, THIS was a mistake.

The story itself is only OK. This is perhaps my third or fourth Sakey book in a row (started with Brilliance and really enjoyed it). It was the weakest. As the publisher's blurb explains, this is the story about a run-of-the-mill couple who find $400,000 and decide to keep it -- with disastrous consequences. The theme (average people facing temptations they should have walked away from) is a common Sakey theme. In this novel, the conversations about "Woe is us, why did we do this when we had everything we wanted to already?" get repetitious. The twists and turns, as always, are ingenious (and surprising)...but the conversations get in the way.

I will read other Sakey's, for sure. But this one was only so-so.