Clearly a fan of the hard-boiled noir detective
fiction of writers like Dashiell Hammett Raymond Chandler, and
Ross MacDonald,
Chris
Knopf updates the genre with a tale of modern murder in the salty,
sandy, money-drenched Hamptons.
Sam Acquillo, a burned-out corporate
v.p. and engineer, has dumped his job and his wife and retired
to drink and brood in the small
cottage his father built in the 1940s in a working class enclave
along the Little Peconic Bay. It's 2000, and "a neighborhood
like this, in a place like this, is a little like a guy in
a cheap suit accidentally invited to a gallery opening."
Sam
sits on his porch staring out at the bay, drinking vodka,
smoking filtered Camels and talking to his dog. But when he
discovers the
body of his neighbor, a mean old lady universally disliked,
something stirs. Maybe it's the engineer in him noticing
things that don't
quite fit. He volunteers to administer her meager estate,
a job no one else wants, and soon makes himself enough of a nuisance
to land in the hospital, concussed.
An amateur boxer who
keeps himself in shape and is not averse to physical contact
(taking after his father who was beaten
to death
in a barroom brawl), Sam gives the police no help in finding
his attacker and keeps on probing. Along the way he meets
several smart
and interesting women who seem to find him as attractive
as he finds them, keeping possibilities in play, and has
a few
more
brushes with violence, not all of them defensive.
Knopf
paces this stylish debut well, revealing his narrator's complex
character as he unravels the tangle of his mystery,
imbuing all
with a strong sense of place. Sam, though likable from
the start, grows on the reader as he doggedly pursues
a mystery
with nothing
in it for him but the satisfaction of a job well done.
Though damaged and stubborn, he's a man of integrity
and cautious
feeling.
A part-time resident himself, Knopf also captures
the feel of the Hamptons - greed drawn by natural beauty
through
no fault
of its
own, beleaguered locals edged out by rich summer people
- and transports the reader to its village streets,
sprawling mansions,
neighborhood
watering holes and spectacular vistas.
With its snappy
(though occasionally overlong) dialogue, intelligent humor
and strong protagonist, readers will
be glad there's
at least one more Acquillo novel in the works.
