The best thing about “Hard Stop,” Chris
Knopf’s
fourth book in the Sam Acquillo series, is a four-legged character
called Eddie Van Halen. Eddie is your basic found-in-the-pound mutt who doesn’t
solve much crime — unless you count sniffing out a big
bloody brain staked to a door by a Japanese knife — but
he leaps off the page every time he appears. Lose Eddie and you
might as well stick with Chandler, Hammett, Elmore Leonard, John
D. MacDonald — or do I mean Ross? — and all those
other authors Mr. Knopf strives to emulate. And pretty much succeeds.
The bright red jacket for “Hard Stop” makes for
a striking package from the Sag Harbor publisher Permanent Press,
which has published the three previous Sam Acquillo books, “The
Last Refuge,” “Two Time,” and “Head Wounds.” Chris
Knopf writes what they call hard-boiled crime fiction — the
unsentimental stuff that used to be quite pulpy until it was
refined by the above-mentioned authors.
I first had my socks knocked off by Mr. Knopf
four years ago — along
with everyone else, according to the critical acclaim — when
he made his debut with “The Last Refuge.” In that
book he introduced us to Sam Acquillo, the engaging, wisecracking,
middle-aged corporate dropout who has taken up residence in a
cottage with a screened-in porch, built by his father to overlook
Little Peconic Bay.
Here’s what Sam has: boxing skills, an ex-wife, a daughter
he’s finally getting close to, a 1967 Grand Prix, a wealthy
girlfriend who shares a peninsula with him and who conveniently
owns an Audi and a shiny red Dodge pickup that he borrows when
he feels like it, and a whole host of useful East End characters
he can call on for favors — cops, real estate brokers,
fishermen, barmen, computer geeks. I particularly like his lawyer, “a
curvy thing with a lot of freckles and a head full of kinky strawberry
blond hair” who goes by the name of Jackie Swaitowski and
is described thus by Sam: “Jackie was nominally my lawyer.
I’d never paid her anything and she hadn’t done much
but keep me out of jail.”
Here’s what Sam doesn’t have: a computer, a TV (he
doesn’t understand the “confusion of ticker tape
messages scrolling along the bottom of the screen on modern television”),
and the ability to stay out of trouble.
Sam might be a transplant from Connecticut,
but he gets it that while they come to “the Hamptons,” we live in real
places like Springs, Napeague, Noyac. While he gets around all
over the East End, I’m guessing from the way he’s
gently dismissive of other villages — “Amagansett
was a short row of shops to either side of Montauk Highway,” “Montauk
always felt like what it was, an outpost at the end of the known
universe” — that Sam’s heart is in Sag Harbor,
where he does a lot of his drinking. Essentially he runs on vodka
(Absolut Raspberri) and coffee (Gevalia chocolate raspberry),
and occasionally he even does a little work, as a carpenter assigned
to make teak planters and corner cabinets.
But in “Hard Stop” his corporate past — he
was a high-earning engineer at Consolidated Global Energies,
with 4,000 people in his division — catches up with him
when he comes home one night to find an intruder with a big black
automatic.
The intruder’s name is Honest Joe Ackerman — I know,
I know, probably a hard-boiled name — and he’s there
at the behest of Sam’s old Con Globe chairman of the board,
George Donovan. George’s wife holds a significant share
of Con Globe’s voting stock, enough to compel the board
to review George’s chairmanship if she has a good enough
reason. Which she might if she finds out that George has got
himself a babe on the side, a foxy Asian consultant (Princeton,
Harvard Business School, and climbing the consultancy ladder
as fast as she can) called Iku Kinjo. The trouble is, Iku’s
gone missing in the Hamptons and George needs Sam to go look
for her.
Sam finds her on page 99, lying on a single
bed in the basement of a summer rental. She’s “clutching
the handle of a large carving knife with two hands, the blade
buried to the hilt, having passed upward behind her chin through
her palate and into her brain.”
It takes him another 164 pages to discover
who killed her, during which time he comes into contact with
plenty of other unsavory employees of Con Globe, not to mention
the former Princeton weirdos who were Iku’s co-renters. There’s a terrific car
chase with a Mustang hogging the rear bumper of the Grand Prix,
and for once Eddie does as he’s told and quakes in the
footwell of the front passenger seat. At the point of impact,
Sam is concussed, but it’s a lot worse for the guys in
the Mustang. As for Eddie, he jumps back on the seat with his
tail down and gives a single, emphatic bark: What was that all
about?
I must confess that I was disappointed with
the plot of “Hard
Stop.” It seemed a little thin, a little one-note, a bit
same old same old, with Sam making the rounds of a fairly predictable
investigation. But to paraphrase an excellent point made by Lee
Child on a panel at BookHampton’s Mayhem weekend recently,
readers enjoy a series for the central character. No one remembers
the stories. They just remember the Lone Ranger. And that’s
how it is with Sam Acquillo. He’s what you sign on for
and he delivers. He’s the Lone Ranger of the East End.
And Eddie is his Tonto. Or do I mean Silver?
“Hard Stop”
Chris Knopf
The Permanent Press, $28
Chris Knopf lives part time in Southampton.
Hope McIntyre is the author of the Lee Bartholomew crime series
about a ghostwriter. Under her real name, Caroline Upcher, she
has also published numerous novels and was an editorial director
for publishing houses in London and New York for many years.
A resident of Amagansett, she now runs First Base, an online
editorial service.
