Several miles to the east of Greenwich Village
lie the Hamptons, the
setting of Chris Knopf’s The Last Refuge (The Permanent Press,
$26),
but for all the Hamptons’ idyllic beauty, the mood here is
strictly
mean-streets noir. Sam Acquillo, an engineer whose one big invention
has allowed him to go to seed in a his parents’ tumble-down
Southampton
cottage, is enlisted to administer the estate of his dead next-door
neighbor, a friendless old woman who drowned in her bath. But
as
Acquillo slogs through the old woman’s papers, he begins
to suspect
that her death was no accident, and that far from being friendless,
she
had friends in very high places. Knopf’s hard-edged yet literary
style
is complemented by astute observation of society’s haves
and have-nots,
all living elbow-to-elbow to each other on some very expensive
real
estate. The Last Refuge is a reminder that a vacation paradise
can have
secrets as dark as any big city, especially when money is involved.
