Chris Knopf – författare

A routine visit to one of Sam Acquillo’s job sites becomes anything but. The home’s owner, Victor Bollings, is lying in a pool of blood, the back of his head bashed in. One of Sam’s closest friends in the cabinetry trade is quickly behind bars as the obvious suspect. For the cops, this is all standard operating procedure. But as it turns out, nothing about the case is routine, obvious, or standard in any way.

Sam and defense attorney Jackie Swaitkowski are used to an uneasy, though often reciprocal, relationship with law enforcement. But when the chief of police tells Sam to stay the hell away, this time he really means it. For Sam and Jackie, words like this are highly motivational, until strange new forces emerge from the shadows. Forces from well beyond the borders of Southampton, from worlds as sinister as they are unfathomable.

That doesn’t mean Sam and Jackie still don’t have a responsibility to defend the utterly defenseless: a Colombian immigrant with no legal status, no political power, and no alibi, with the full weight of the judicial system—local, state, national, and international—arrayed against him.

The eighth edition of the Sam Acquillo mystery series disrupts the illusion that the Hamptons are safely immune from the struggles that inflame much of the world. It’s an examination of how fear of the unknown ignites prejudice and hate, overturning norms of decency and principle.

For Sam and Jackie, it’s also a lesson in the interconnectedness of evil.

Sailing back from Maine, Sam Acquillo, his girlfriend, Amanda Anselma, and screwball mutt Eddie Van Halen get blown off course by a dangerous gale. With damaged boat and frayed nerves, they limp into the closest harbor, which happens to be on Fishers Island, New York, a distant and altogether disassociated scrap of Long Island.

A summer preserve for the oldest old money in America, it is defended by year-round denizens who safeguard their island’s insularity with xenophobic fervor. Sam and Amanda are hardly welcomed with open arms, unless they’re the arms of the young and beautiful Anika Fey, daughter of the owner of the Black Swan, the island’s only hotel, who’s only too eager to fold Sam into her embrace.

But feminine wiles aren’t the only hazard faced by Sam and Amanda. They’re soon swept up in big-money intrigue, dark conspiracy, brutality, murder, and the machinations of high-tech millionaires, to say nothing of the autumn storms that lash the island with wind and wave.

In the years since losing everything, Sam has fought his way back to an existence that even he believes is worth preserving. And now, bad timing and a broken rudder could result in the greatest loss of all—his life.

Gwendalynn Anders, a mid-Western girl who’s never seen the ocean, wonders what was in that joint she smoked a week before waking up on Elysiana and why it feels like the trip will last the entire summer of 1969.

Jack Halcyon, living atop an abandoned twenty-story hotel, wonders how he’s able to ponder the incongruities of life after leaving a big chunk of his brain at the scene of an accident.

Borough council president Norman Harlan wonders what cruel god put him on an equal footing with Avery Volpe, the fearsome captain of the Beach Patrol.

Twelve miles long and a mile wide, Elysiana is an island off the coast of New Jersey sitting astride the convergence of powerful fault lines, social, political, and existential. It’s a place of beauty and insanity, shared by the angelic and profane, where cops, criminals, prodigies, and the promiscuous find themselves at the haphazard mercy of a lunatic providence.

Other players include a globe-trotting whiz kid, an Italo-Hispanic crime boss, a surfing aesthete and his vulgar roommate, a career car-stereo thief, and a seven-year-old girl who’s probably spent too much time with the dead bodies in the dunes.

This is a story that could have only happened on the Jersey Shore during the summer of ’69, a time when the social fabric was tearing apart, in a place where that fabric had never been very well knit together. Elysiana is both a fabulist’s look at a lost time and place and a hurtling thriller. It’s a tale of two types of transition: the personal and the grand, all played out within the isolated magic of a barrier island.

Imagine this: You have a nice life. You love your beautiful, successful wife. You’re an easygoing guy working out of your comfortable Connecticut home. The world is an interesting, pleasant place. Then in seconds, it’s all gone. You’re still alive, but the world thinks you’re dead. And now you have to decide: make it official, or go after the evil that took it all away from you.

Arthur Cathcart, market researcher and occasional finder of missing persons, decides to live on and fight by doing what he knows best—figuring things out without revealing his status as a living, breathing human being. Much easier said than done in the post-9/11 world, where everything about yourself and all the tools you need to live a modern life are an open book. How do you become a different person? How do you finance an elaborate scheme without revealing yourself? How, as a dead man, do you force a reckoning with the worst people on earth?

Mystery writer Chris Knopf, who has examined complex what-ifs in eight other novels, tackles these intriguing questions in a tale of mindless venality, phantom identity, impossible obstacles, and the triumph of intellect and imagination over brute force.

When market researcher Arthur Cathcart emerged from a coma and set out to track down whoever murdered his wife, the results were far from preordained. Wounded and alone, grief stricken and hiding off the grid, he thought the only mystery was who killed Florencia—and why. But the quest for justice uncovers a host of fresh mysteries, beginning with an elaborate fraud and embezzlement scheme, complete with dummy corporations and offshore numbered accounts.

In place of "who killed Florencia?" he was forced to ask "who was Florencia?" There was nothing about their lives together that answered this or any of a thousand questions she left behind. All he really knew was that she came from Chile, had a knack for figures, and owned her own insurance agency.

So Arthur takes off again to do what he does best: find out stuff. What follows is a chase around the world, from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean and remote points north and south. Armed with a portfolio of false identities, hard-learned tradecraft, and the continued cloak of anonymity, Cathcart, now with Natsumi Fitzgerald at his side, plunges into the world of international terrorism and government intrigue, where the currency is betrayal and the rewards are calculated in blood and revenge.

Arthur Cathcart and Natsumi Fitzgerald wanted to believe they were free of the nearly invisible, malignant forces they had pursued, and been pursued by, across continents and oceans. The slightly brain-damaged tech-freak researcher and the blackjack-dealing psychologist had convinced themselves that life aboard a sailboat in the Caribbean, incognito and in love, could be a lasting refuge.

The death of that illusion was as brutal as it was abrupt. Even people who knew how to dodge ruthless outlaws and relentless law enforcement learned there were powers from which no one could ever hide—not in the twenty-first century, not if you wanted more than to simply exist. To truly live in the world, you had to have a world that allows you to live. Soldiers fighting in Vietnam had a saying when pinned down under enemy fire: The only way out is through. And so it is that Arthur and Natsumi take to the fight, where the full expanse of both the virtual and material worlds is the field of engagement, nearly blind to the threats that surround them yet searching for that impossible path back to the ordinary lives they''d been forced to abandon.

Wiser, stronger, and more experienced in the art of clandestine combat than they ever imagined they''d be, Arthur and Natsumi understand what makes you strong can also get you killed in a hurry—that the reserves of resilience and determination aren''t limitless, that the power of intellect and craft dwindles in the face of a pitiless and resolute foe, that there are a billion ways to die but only one way to live.

It’s bad enough when someone you know is brutally murdered; it’s worse when the guy was a paranoid schizophrenic helplessly bound to a wheelchair. Sam Acquillo and Jackie Swaitkowski tried to look after Alfie Aldergreen, as had others around the Village of Southampton, but now they were forced to wonder what else they could have done.

One thing is for certain, Alfie’s killers are about to know what it means to murder a friend of Sam—former corporate troubleshooter, former professional boxer, and all-around ornery bulldog—and Jackie, a defense lawyer often described as an avenging angel.

This sixth installment in the Sam Acquillo Hamptons mystery series brings back Knopf’s ensemble of famously eccentric and involving characters, not the least of which is Sam’s mutt, Eddie Van Halen. Not just a crime story, it examines the fraught intersection of wealth, culture, politics, and the ravages of an ugly war. Combining beautiful watery settings with a unique look into the underbelly of the Hamptons, it’s a mystery you won’t find anywhere else.

As Sam Acquillo tells us in the early pages of Back Lash, “Not everyone gets to live their adult lives orbiting a central mystery.” But that’s how it’s been for Sam, whose entire existence has been defined by a single, horrific event. Now that event has reached out from the deep past, an unwanted visitor, and Sam is forced to unpack, like a Russian doll, secrets within secrets, each more ominous than the one before. What is revealed would be disturbing enough were it not also so personal—not a welcome development for a man who once said, “Avoidance, rationalization, and denial are highly underrated coping strategies.”

The action moves from Southampton to the Bronx, where Sam once prowled in the part-time care of his father, owner of a truck-repair business and of a temper that stood out even on the mean streets. It’s here that Sam learns that evil history doesn’t only repeat itself, it can improve upon the original; that no matter how things change, the world of cops and criminals, priests, power brokers, wise guys, and even wiser old bartenders stays the same—or gets much, much worse.

Organizational psychologist Dr. Waters is a happily solitary guy with a few deep attachments, including to his boss Paresh Rajput, the owner of a thriving hi-tech aerospace company. Until something really bad happens to CEO Rajput, which throws Waters into a lunatic swirl of murderous stalkers, corporate intrigue, amorous female executives, and crafty cops who see the inscrutable psychologist as murder suspect #1.

Waters is hardly defenseless. A weight-lifter and former wrestler, ace poker player and master student of human nature, he takes it all on with surprising strength and determination.

If they only knew. As with the connivers surrounding him, Waters has his own secrets. Autistic as a child, he lives with the consequences—some blessings, others a curse. And a love affair that’s hidden even more deeply, or so he thinks.

You’re Dead is a mystery/thriller, an adventure story, though in the context of the present zeitgeist the financial stakes of hi-tech ascendancy and flourishing commerce, corporate and personal venality, manipulations by the rich and powerful men and women and the ugly presence of base criminality that crackles around the fringes. It’s about troubled and troubling minds, and institutions that struggle to assert relevance, but also how one man, single-minded and apart, can disrupt what the lead detective on the case calls “their clever-clever ways.”

Every writer has their themes and preoccupations. For Knopf, it’s the intricacies of the mind, the most complex organism in the universe. The aberrations, as well as the indefinable “normal.” You’re Dead is an action-filled examination of what happens when minds of all kinds collide.

Jackie Swaitkowski investigates the death of a female pilot who had a family tree filled with ex-cons and a passenger list packed with Hamptons high society. Just before Eugenie Conklin''s plane took a nosedive, she tossed out a camera case that held an unusual set of photos. While defending Eugenie''s husband during the accident investigation, Jackie realizes that she recognizes more than a few of the faces in those pictures. They may be able to prove her client''s innocence but Jackie soon learns that to find the answer to Eugenie''s death will mean uncovering a mystery from her own family''s past as well.