Southampton
Press July 27, 2006
Detective’s
New Case Not To Be Missed
By Fred Volkmer
Readers who enjoyed Chris Knopf’s debut mystery, “The
Last Refuge,” will be overjoyed that Mr. Knopf has brought
back his protagonist, Sam Acquillo, to solve yet another murder.
Readers who haven’t yet discovered Chris Knopf or Sam
Acquillo are in for a rare treat. I envy them their discovery.
This second novel in what I hope will become a series is “Two
Time.” It begins with a bang, quite literally, and ends
in delight. It is not to be missed.
Chris Knopf lives part-time in Southampton
Village and is an award-winning copywriter, one of the principals
in Mintz & Hoke,
a Connecticut marketing communications firm.
Mr. Knopf’s detective, Sam Acquillo, is actually a retired
engineer and former prizefighter who lives in a slightly run-down
cottage in North Sea overlooking the Little Peconic. In “The
Last Refuge” he was completely disaffected, having fled
his corporate job, divorced his wife, and alienated his only
daughter. His only amusements were to fiddle with his 1967 Grand
Prix and gaze in the evening at the Little Peconic, glass of
Absolut in hand, while chatting with his dog, Eddie. In “Two
Time” he is making an effort to come to terms with life.
He’s actually building an extension on his cottage. And
he’s begun communicating with his daughter with haiku-like
postcards. Not much to most of us, maybe, but a step.
The novel begins while he’s waiting at an East Hampton
waterfront restaurant for his friend, the lawyer Jackie Swaitkowski,
who appeared memorably in “The Last Refuge.” While
waiting he notices a man stepping out of a Lexus to throw a ball
to his poodle, an activity in which he engages for a while. His
cell phone rings; he gets back into the car, and is blown to
kingdom come by enough C-4 plastiques explosive to kill everyone
in the restaurant. Although the quick-thinking Sam locates the
late-arriving Jackie and drags her to a safe spot, half of her
face is mangled by shattered glass, and she is in for many sessions
of surgery.
The intended victim was Jonathan Eldridge,
a wealthy financial consultant. After Homeland Security, the
FBI, and the State Police make no headway in the case, Sam’s friend, Southampton
Town policeman Joe Sullivan, enlists Sam to talk to Eldridge’s
severely agoraphobic wife, Apollonia. She is educated and fragile
and Joe feels that there is no one in the department who will
be able to talk to her without frightening her.
Sam is a graduate of MIT, and in spite of
his current lifestyle and mode of speech, he is sophisticated
enough, and sensitive enough, Joe believes, to be able to elicit
some information from her. (Don’t ask what a Southampton
Town policeman is doing investigating a murder in East Hampton
that has also involved the FBI and Homeland Security. Suspend
your disbelief; it will be worth it.)
Sam protests. He’d like not to get involved, yet he can’t
resist plunging in to investigate a murder that almost included
him and Jackie as victims, permanently scarring her. Needless
to say, Sam does not fail to get information. He is a bulldog
possessed of the problem-solving mind of an engineer.
Apollonia provides him with a letter encouraging
anyone connected with Eldridge to talk to him on the pretext
that he is attempting to see if Eldridge’s business is saleable. He investigates
Eldridge’s business connections and client base, though
everything seems above board. He nevertheless thinks that a disgruntled
investor who failed to get rich might want to get even.
He discovers that Eldridge’s brother was one of his clients.
And though he made a lot of money for him, they were barely on
speaking terms. The brother has changed his name to Ellington
and has become a highly successful artist, much sought after
by the cognoscenti, or rather those with money, south of the
highway. He also discovers that one man who had lost a lot of
money as a result of Eldridge’s advice was Ivor Fleming,
a former small-time hood who made a fortune in scrap metal up
the island, whose house and person are protected by a Doberman
and two goons, Connie and Ike, with whom Sam exchanges mutually
threatening small talk.
There is also a successful woman restaurateur who was as furious
with Eldridge as Fleming. Though she has no Doberman or hired
muscle, she would have been as inclined to do him in. The stakes
rise in the mystery when Sam finds Joe Sullivan stabbed and close
to death in his backyard.
Into this serious mix come a few more characters
from “The
Last Refuge”: Paul Hodges, who owns a small restaurant
in North Sea, where he dispenses advice from the bar and a mysterious “white” fish
from his kitchen; and Amanda Anselma, his almost-lover in that
book, who has moved next door. Romantic sparks fly.
I will stop here and let you enjoy the book
for itself. But I have a reviewer’s responsibility to tell you that you
will enjoy it, if I know anything at all about mysteries. Mr.
Knopf has a wonderful way with words and has brought the hardboiled,
wise-cracking detective into Southampton and made it feel as
though this, as much as Los Angeles or Boston, is his natural
home, mean streets or not. I was completely baffled until the
murderer was revealed and closed the book with an audible “ha!” of
satisfaction that startled my wife.
I turned the pages not only to find out what
was going to happen next; I read on to hear what Sam would
say next. Robert Parker’s
Spencer has nothing on Chris Knopf’s Sam Acquillo when
it comes to snappy, hard-boiled repartee or commentary. He describes
Riverhead, for instance, as “a little urban barge afloat
on a sea of wealth and aspiration.”
He passes a sod farm on the way to Riverhead.
It is “not
like the ones in Oklahoma. They were growing instant lawns. Just
cut it up, haul it off to Biffy and Foo-Foo’s, roll it
out and the automatic sprinklers do the rest. I wondered if they
also harvested cappuccino or BMW convertibles somewhere in the
area.” Of his old high school girlfriend’s jaw line: “I’d
always admired [it] as one of God’s acts of architectural
perfection.”
And who would expect a concise criticism of deconstructionism
while Sam decks both Connie and Ike after they accost him at
the lumberyard? Literary theory and broken noses in a few swift
paragraphs.
“Two Time” is brilliant and Chris
Knopf has perfect pitch for language, plot, and character.
Sam Acquillo is a fresh face on the mystery scene, and very
much a welcome addition. If he continues in this vein, he is
destined for a wide audience.
|
