Broadcast on WLIU FM, an NPR
station, on May 6, 2008.
Reviewer is Joan Baum Head Wounds by Chris Knopf is published by The Permanent
Press.
People do fall in love with fictional characters – my
own early passion was Hamlet – but that was way back when.
A time Shakespeare’s Cleopatra called her “salad
days,” when she was green in judgment and cold in blood.
Put on some years, rack up experience and it’s easy for
middle-age affections to shift to someone like Sam Acquillo,
the smart, combative and cynical protagonist of Chris Knopf’s
new novel, Head Wounds, the third book in his Hamptons
Mystery series.
I fell for Sam three years ago, the first
time he came to life in Knopf’s literate, smart-talking
and suspenseful The
Last Refuge, and renewed my attraction to him in the sequel, Two
Time. In Head Wounds Sam is 54, as argumentative
and sarcastic as ever, but a guy who likes to read Kant on the
back porch of his parents’ old cottage on Little Peconic
Bay, seeking “the comfort of anonymity” when not
the “solace of organized brutality,” working out
in a gym. An engineer, an MIT grad, former CEO, and boxer, who
gave it all up many years ago when he walked away from his hi-test
wife and job and became a carpenter on The East End, Sam refers
to himself laconically as a “recovering empiricist,” a “novitiate
in the ways of bewildered anguish.” Knopf can really turn
a good phrase.
In Head Wounds Sam is older but
no wiser. As he admits, he’s good at “resignation and denial,” and
even better at “avoiding emotional conflict.” And
he’s still knocking back an incredible number of Absoluts
every day, many of them in his favorite Sag Harbor bar, and tooling
around in his beloved `67 Grand Prix with Eddie Van Halen at
his side. Not the rocker. A dog. And romancing the beautiful,
quirky Amanda Anselma, a neighbor on Peconic Bay, as both get
caught up again in money-madness murder, and what Sam calls the “weird
social ecosystem of the Hamptons,” a place “plagued” with
sophistication. Only this time it’s Sam who’s the
prime suspect. With good reason.
Head Wounds also brings back some
of Sam’s wonderful
side kicks—his slightly ditzy but smart female lawyer,
his supportive super-rich Maidstone Club friend, and his black
doctor buddy from Southampton Hospital. Though Knopf knows how
to craft a compelling tale, it’s really the characters
and the setting that make his books distinctive. The action takes
place in May when warmer weather means restaurant tables near
open doors, so many of them, Sam says, “they could have
been traded on the commodities market.” And how Hamptons,
when Sam comes across an office plaque announcing: “Construction
Management, Floors Refinished and Installed, Real Estate, Fine
Arts.”
I don’t know how long Knopf can keep Sam vertical and
The East End awash in dead bodies, but at the moment I am contemplating
bumping off Amanda, picking up a fifth of vodka, along with some
dog biscuits, and heading over to Sam’s place.
