Chris Knopf's latest novel, Head Wounds, opens with an incentive
to hurry on to the next 308 pages: "The evening started out innocently enough, Amanda's
outfit notwithstanding." And most of those pages reach the
same level of relaxed hipness and literary style, making this
Hamptons mystery an entertaining escape for summer or any other
time of year.
Third in a series preceded by The
Last Refuge and Two Time, Head Wounds features Sam Acquillo,
an MIT engineering graduate, ex-boxer, ex-corporate R&D boss,
angry ex-husband, and now East End carpenter inordinately fond
of vodka. His diverse resume opens up all sorts of plot possibilities,
which Knopf deftly manipulates.
Part of the fun is the mix of
real and fake places sprinkled throughout the book. Locales like
Noyack, North Sea and Sag Harbor are identified, while others
are only described enough to help us figure out where Sam eats
and drinks. We know he lives in a rustic cottage left to him
by his mother on the shore of Little Peconic Bay. That was fortunate,
because Sam moved there when he was released from a detox facility
in Connecticut and had no other place to go.
He lives in the cottage
with another cool character, a big mutt named Eddie Van Halen.
They love and understand each other but are quite independent
and their interaction is amusing.
"I went home first to check on Eddie, fill
his bowls with food and water and make sure he had the cottage
under control. I don't know how old he was when I sprang him
from the pound, but probably no more than two or three. In those
formative years he'd learned to be basically self-sufficient.
He was always glad to see me when I showed up, but not so much
that you'd think he couldn't live without me. He'd often run
up from the beach or bolt out of the wetlands to the west of
the property when I drove in the driveway. I never asked what
he was doing in there, and he never told."
In the first few
chapters we get a fistfight, arson and a murder involving a carpenter's
tool, which throws suspicion onto Sam, especially since his fingerprints
are on the tool. True to the Hamptons, the plot revolves around
real estate shenanigans. A couple of bad old boys are trying
to cheat Sam's girlfriend, the aforementioned Amanda, out of
a tract of land she inherited and wants to develop.
Arrayed against
her, and by proxy, Sam, is a bunch headed by Jeff Milhouser,
a builder, and his son Robbie. In high school Robbie dated Amanda
and never got over her. Sam has a couple of fistfights with a
menacing ex-convict, Patrick Getty, one of Milhouser's construction
crew. Ross Semple, Southampton chief of police, and detective
Lionel Vekstrom think Sam deserves the grief he's getting. Sam's
former wife, Abby, would like to see him dead, especially after
the imaginative revenge he wreaked on her townhouse in Connecticut.
Another bad guy, Roy Battiston, another one of Amanda's ex-boyfriends,
is in jail but still causing trouble. Caught up in the mayhem
is Zach Horowitz, assistant regional director of the DEC and
former Southampton Town treasurer.
Several attractive women are
working hard to save Sam while at the same time trying to get
him into bed. Besides the beleaguered Amanda, Sam's local attorney
Jackie Swiatkowski has her hands full with his outrageous behavior,
and Rosalind Arnold, a high school psychologist, digs up dirt
on the bad guys.
A supporting
cast of colorful friends includes Southampton detective Joe Sullivan,
Burton Lewis, a sophisticated, gay lawyer and advisor to Jackie,
and Markham Fairchild, a neurologist at Southampton Hospital
who's worried that Sam's boxing career may have caused him brain
damage. Paul Hodges runs a fisherman's bar and grill in Sag Harbor
with his daughter Dorothy, who tends bar.
"Dorothy was in her mid-twenties and looked
like she'd died recently after being trapped in a dark closet.
Based on seeing other young people around the Village, I guessed
the sepulchral disposition was intentional. Something I meant
to ask my own daughter when I had the chance. Tonight she was
wearing a wife-beater undershirt over a black bra, with black
polyester slacks and mechanics boots. Her hair, also black, had
been forced into angry, slickened spikes. Her skin was so pale
you could distinguish between veins and arteries."
The plot
thickens at times but Knopf doesn't stretch coincidence too far
and holds the story together nicely. Dialogue flows easily and
only here and there does the prose verge on the purple, slipping
past the author's surefooted restraint. And because we enjoyed
the novel so much we'll forgive Knopf for dropping in a word
like "Bodhisattva," which we had to look up and found
it shouldn't be capped.
