MARCUS SAKEY – Good People. Onyx, paperback, 2009. Hardcover edition: Dutton, August 2008.

   I was prepared for a good read based on a strong recommendation by the co-owner of my local mystery bookstore, somewhat bolstered by Dennis Lehane’s blurb that concludes by anointing Sakey “as exactly the electric jolt American crime fiction needs.”

   A young couple, burdened with financial problems and their continuing, unsuccessful attempts to have a child, have taken in a boarder. After his sudden death (apparently from natural causes), when they go in to clear out the apartment, they find a cache of several hundred thousand dollars.

   When the “good people” decide to keep the money and compound their crime by lying repeatedly to the police, the tenant’s former partners in a bank job that had netted them the money, learning of their partner’s death, lay siege to the couple.

   The situation continues to spiral downward, with the innocent (the wife’s sister) suffering more than the guilty. There’s a “happy” ending of sorts for the couple, who, because of their duplicity, get the baby they want but don’t deserve, an ending that left a sour taste in my mouth.

   The only “jolt” I got from this contemporary noir, cobbled together from shopworn materials put to better use by any number of better writers, going back decades, was when I thought of the eight dollars I wasted. It’s enough to make me, finally, decide to pull my library card out of storage and limit my purchases to less chancy ware.