Hard Stop by Chris Knopf is published
by The Permanent Press.
Sam Acquillo, Chris Knopf’s smart, heavy-drinking ex engineer
and corporate VP, boxer, rehab denizen—now a carpenter—likes
to listen to jazz as he tools around The East End in his `67
Pontiac Grand Prix, but toward the end of the book, WLIU is named.
The station’s promoting a Mozart festival at Southampton
College, and Mozart, says Sam, always has a calming effect on
him. So does Absolut Vodka, smoking Camels and being with his
Little Peconic Bay girlfriend Amanda—not to mention hanging
out with Eddie, his beloved dog, rescued from a pound, and named
for the rocker, Eddie Van Halen. What does not have a calming
effect on Sam is finding an intruder in his Southampton cottage
one night with an automatic.
From the way the novel opens, you know something
ominous is about to spring. Knopf moves in fast, doesn’t hold
his narrative punches. “I didn’t like anything about
that big, dumb, ugly SUV. I didn’t like the way it looked.
All black, with a toothy gold grill. I didn’t like the
windows tinted nearly opaque. I mostly didn’t like where
it was parked—a half block from my house.” In his
delightfully terse and incremental style, Sam is off and running,
with his fight training and smart mouth kicking in. We wouldn’t
have it any other way. In his mid-fifties now—and this
is his fourth appearance in a Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery—Sam
is as cynical, funny and decent as ever. And the action-canvas
once again stretches over the South Fork. The new book’s
called Hard Stop.
That’s “Hard Stop,” as in “Case Closed,
Meeting’s over”— a phrase used by corporation
execs to signal a quick end to board meetings. Of course, “Hard
Stop” is also life’s ultimate punctuation mark. And
for sure it doesn’t take too far into Hard Stop for
a dead body to show itself. It turns out that Sam’s intruder
was sent to dig up dirt on Sam to blackmail him into doing the
bidding of his former CEO. The married and elderly corporation
head is distraught—his young Japanese girlfriend has gone
missing, and only Sam, who knew her as a colleague, can be counted
on to find her. If he does, there will be a nice monetary sweetener
in it for him. But Sam being Sam, will have none of this. First,
there’s no dirt to dig up, and second, he wouldn’t
go for such sleaze. So, naturally, Sam, who has by now returned
intrusion with intrusion by breaking into his former boss’s
house, agrees to help find the missing girl. Intuition tells
him that his former boss, who may be as greedy and manipulative
as they come, is sincere: he truly valued Sam at the company
and truly loves the girl. But guess whose body Sam will soon
discover in a group rental cottage in Amagansett?
The plot of Hard Stop may not be
the most subtle, but the delights lie in the characters and
setting. Sam is at the center, of course, but it’s
good to welcome back buddies from earlier novels, including Jackie, his slightly
wacky lady lawyer, Pete, a Sag Harbor bar owner who keep Sam and Eddie well watered
and fed, friends on the police force and a black doctor at Southampton Hospital
who has a right-on mordant sense of humor. You don’t need
to have read the previous novels, however, to keep up with the
new shenanigans. And there are always new characters who prove
entertaining, such an acquaintance of the deceased whose name
is Zelda Fitzgerald. Hey, this IS a Long Island tale.
