THE NOTE, ALAFAIR BURKE's latest thriller

THE NOTE
ALAFAIR BURKE
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A vacation in the Hamptons goes terribly wrong for three friends with a complicated history.

It was meant to be a harmless prank.

Growing up, May Hanover was a good girl, always. Well-behaved, top of her class, a compulsive rule-follower. Raised by a first-generation Chinese single mother with high expectations, May didn’t have room to slip up, let alone fail. Her friends didn’t call her the Little Sheriff for nothing.

But even good girls have secrets. And regrets. When it comes to her friendship with Lauren and Kelsey, she's had her fair share of both. Their bond—forged when May was just twelve years old—has withstood a tragic accident, individual scandals, heartbreak and loss. Now the three friends have reunited for the first time in years for a few days of sun and fun in the Hamptons. But a chance encounter with a pair of strangers leads to a drunken prank that goes horribly awry.

When she finds herself at the center of an urgent police investigation, May begins to wonder whether Lauren and Kelsey are keeping secrets from her, testing the limits of her loyalty to lifelong friends.

What had they gone and done?

The Note is a page-turner of the highest order from one of our greatest contemporary suspense writers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Every single person in this book is supremely, unpleasantly toxic. This is by design, not incompetence on the author's part; she's imbibed storycraft with her every breath, being James Lee Burke's child. As a choice, then, I can only call it questionable because most of us...even thriller readers...prefer to see someone in the cast we can at least believe will end up in a better place than they have started. It doesn't help that May, our more central character, gets a lot of carping criticism at every turn from Lauren and Kelsey (her lifelong "friends"). Which, to be scrupulously honest, she returns with interest. Not one of them seems to realize every finger they're pointing at the others has four times as many pointing right back at them.

So the cast didn't elicit my readerly sympathy. I was more interested in their barbs, their curious blindness to their own flaws, as they went away for a girls' escape weekend to the Hamptons after they've each suffered a more or less public shaming. Reconnecting amid the hustle of adulthood can work wonders and revive a relationship or crash and burn. I was sure it would be the latter as May seemed to me to be a bit too tunnel-visiony, Kelsey too unconcerned about her shaming, and Lauren too smug for Author Burke to be setting anything else up.

What kept me going wasn't suspense, exactly, since who did the awful thing that's done was not hard to guess, but the way Author Burke unfolded it. It's an episode of Real Housewives of {Awful-Place Name Here} meets Knives Out. There's slap-and-tickle levels of sex; the women are plainly out for the thrill but we're not taken along for the consummation. The violence of death isn't in your face, either, which can be the case in thrillers versus series mysteries. It isn't ever going to be my steady diet but as a menu of tapas it was fun enough and fine in the craft sense. I was surprised at enjoying the ending as much as I did.

May's Chinese heritage plays a role in the proceedings that I was mildly over-aware of but I decided early on it was me not the story. I get twitchy when "race" (loathsome inaccurate term) rears its deformed deforming skull. Her trajectory is pretty predictable. Kelsey's slightly older place and Lauren's ultra-privileged position don't make for shocking reveals. They're who they appear to be from giddy-up to whoa. It's a good afternoon's reading, it will definitely keep the holiday bustle at bay, the investment of time and treasure is modest...a winning proposition.

HARD STOP, fourth Hamptons Noir mystery

HARD STOP (Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery #4)
CHRIS KNOPF
The Permanent Press
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this, the fourth installment in the Sam Acquillo series, Sam's past reaches out to pull him back into the world of big money and even bigger egos, where the term "corporate intrigue" is redundant and ambition the only virtue. It seems a woman vital to the private life of a very important person has gone missing in the Hamptons. And it looks like the best way to get her back is to extort the cooperation of Sam Acquillo. After finally achieving some measure of peace and contentment on Long Island, Sam is yet again an accidental player in other people's dramas. It takes him into the world of private security goons, predatory financiers and lifestyles of young hedonists, some brave, some beautiful, all a bit lost. This time Sam has a few ambitions of his own that lead him into something all his battles in the ring and corporate boardrooms could never have prepared him for.

My Review: Knopf is one reliable writer. His Sam Acquillo is a noir hero with the right stuff, whose world is made up of wastes of space and friends. He doesn't much care which side of The Highway (local Hamptonsese for “the tracks”) you live on, were born on, made it big on...do you pull your own weight? Do you decline to play stupid status games? You got a shot at being on Team Acquillo.

In this outing, Sam's enemies are a smidge more removed from his life, since they come from his past as a major mover and shaker in the world of petrochemical engineering. Sam's whole life has been lived, since the implosion of that career with its house, car, marriage, status, and clothes, in an attempt to be what he always really was: A water rat scraping by, doing the carpentry and fixitry he loves best.

Sam's deep disdain for wealth and for showiness are on full display here. He's a brilliant engineer. He's not, however, greedy. And it works for, against, and through him in this book. The pace is pretty unremitting. The language is, as always, witty and amusing then turning into violent and angry. That's what we pay for, after all, when reading noir novels.

The cop characters are more fully drawn, and that helped; the villain, well, the villain is just a nasty piece of work and no doubt ever obtains as to what or how the crimes that were committed came about. There's a minor twist in the murderer's reveal. But it's this sense that Knopf has another hundred pages of needed backstory to reveal that keeps me rating these books in the middle threes. I love economical storytelling. I like a writer who leaves me some room to think what I want to think. But I also need to make some sort of real connection with the characters, all of them, or I don't see the point of working them into the story. Honest Boy, yes the character's name is Honest Boy, is my prime example here. He shows up with that moniker, which means he's got my attention, and then...piff gone for most of the book. When he shows back up it's not to do anything earth-shattering, either. He's set up for a return engagement, like the local journalist in the last book.

All in all, though, this is a solid book and it's by a solid writer and for noiristas this series is a strong bet. Dog lovers should read them just for Eddie Van Halen. I love that mutt. Go get one. No harm will come to your leisure budget.


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HEAD WOUNDS, third Hamptons Noir mystery

HEAD WOUNDS (Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery #3)
CHRIS KNOPF
The Permanent Press
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Sam Acquillo can hide in his windswept waterfront cottage all he wants, but the demons of his past are going to find him. Worse, they've teamed up with some pretty nasty demons of the present, including a very determined Chief of Police whose top detective has Sam caught in the crosshairs.

Part-time carpenter, full-time drinker and co-conspirator with an existential mutt named Eddie Van Halen, Sam tries to lead the simple life. But as always, fate intervenes, this time in the form of Robbie Milhouser, local builder and blundering bully who shares at least one thing with Sam -- an irresistible attraction to the beautiful Amanda Anselma.

Peel back the glitz and glory of the fabled Hamptons and you'll find a beautiful place filled with ugly secrets. This is Sam Acquillo's world. Moving effortlessly across the social divide with wry pal Jackie Swaitkowski and rich guy Burton Lewis, the ex-boxer, ex-corporate infighter seems doomed to straddle the thin red line between envy and love, hate and forgiveness, goodness and greed.

And sometimes life and death. Only this time, the life at stake is his own. .

My Review: This third entry in the Sam Acquillo Hamptons series is, as usual, superior storytelling and top-flight modern noir.

It's set in glitz-a-licious Southampton, New York. The seamy underbelly of same, of course, this being noir. And oh my gracious me is this underbelly seamy! Real estate, in a world as awash in money as Southampton, is going to attract some very unpleasant people. Those there are aplenty in this tale of long-held grudges and long-simmering feuds.

Amanda, Sam's sexy relationship-avoidance cospecialist, is the motivating factor for the story when her efforts to redevelop the neighborhood home she owns in North Sea (Prolehampton, for those not gifted with a Long Island connection) lead to arson and murder, with a trail back to a very dark part of Amanda's pre-glitz Southampton youth. Sam, still running from his inner demons, finds that running from a murder rap is a lot harder than he supposed it would be for an innocent man. Which he's sure he is. We the readers? Well....

Knopf gets the tone of an aging loner's inner monologue pitch-perfect. He knows the indignity of looking in the mirror and seeing someone's grandfather looking back at you from your own eyes. He puts that into Sam's casus belli with the world. Knopf also makes sure we know, without being stupid or unrealistically smutty about it, that Sam's not dead from the waist down, and a cross-section of Southampton Township's females are pleasantly aware of this fact. It's very nice for someone Sam's age to be shown as realistically sexually active and alive, instead of a hyper horndog or simply a man gelded by age.

It's even nicer that Knopf doesn't use it as a ridiculous prop. Sam, while tempted and while quite elozable, isn't about to run out and make more trouble for himself with his bedroom behavior. It's about the only wise thing he does. Glad he picked this one.

Less well-handled are the ins and outs (!) of some series characters, eg Sam's rich lawyer pal Burton and a local paper reporter...clearly inserted for future use; the Township's cops aren't there as more than props; but all of these are minor issues, because the pacing of the story makes deep investments in these sidebar people unwieldy and even, to some degree, undesirable. A little more, a little little bit more...in the name of enriching the tapestry...sacrifice some of the angsting and repetitive violence....

Yes, the violence mandatory in noir is there. Sometimes drearily predictably so. There's a scene with a goon that goes on too long, and in the end is resolved unrealistically, at the end of the book, that strikes me as something we could've done without and missed nothing. A few times, flashbacks to Sam's past are, well, I myownself found that skimming them caused no diminishment in my reading pleasure.

But here's the reason I keep looking for these books, which seem to come out every two years or so: This quote, from the very end of Part 2:

But old Kant would tell you, reality is only as sure as the mind perceiving it. I wished I could get him to take {the doctor}'s seat across from me in the hospital canteen to I could put it to him straight:
Can a man be outsmarted by his own brain?

If that fails to raise a smile on you, this book is not for you.


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TWO TIME, second Hamptons Noir mystery

TWO TIME (Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery #2)
CHRIS KNOPF
The Permanent Press
$18.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Sam Acquillo – ex-boxer, ex-corporate executive and accidental hero of The Last Refuge – is back in this action-packed, page-turning sequel. All Sam wants to do is hammer a few nails into his ramshackle cottage, drink a great deal of vodka, hang out with his dog, Eddie, and stay out of trouble. But trouble seems to find him anyway. When a car bomb outside a trendy waterfront restaurant kills a prominent financial consultant and injures Sam and his lawyer friend Jackie Swaitkowski, he is drawn into the investigation. Where the police have met roadblocks, Sam makes inroads with his trademark wit, instinct and charm. Also, he just wants to know: Why would someone go to such lengths not only to kill someone, but annihilate them?

Set, once again, against the backdrop of Southampton, Long Island, Two Time is full of moody sunsets, beachfront properties and beautiful people with an extraordinary amount of money and very dangerous secrets.

My Review: Sam Acquillo, “retired” (fired for beating up a Fortune 500 stooge who wanted Sam to do unethical stuff) engineer turned curmudgeonly champion of the abused, is back. He's still licking his psychic wounds from The Last Refuge, where his problem-solving skills were used to bring some justice to the world of Southampton Town's unfashionable Bay-side Oak Point. Amanda, the cause of his suffering, owes him her freedom from the workaday world and a husband she didn't like; she really, in fact, owes his silence her absence of jail time.

What's a divorced, lonely, bored guy to do when he falls for a, well, a slightly shopworn angel? Wave bye-bye as she motors out of town, her criminal husband's money in her new suit, that's what. Gratitude, thy name is not Amanda.

But another fun benefit of doing the right thing is that local cop Joe Sullivan now has Sam and his problem-solving skills on the radar, and the fact that Sam is a former big shot with a fancy degree means to Joe that Sam can handle the moneyed elite better than Joe can. And he needs that skill right now.

See, somebody hated investment advisor Jonathan Eldridge enough to blow his narrow ass right up. Taking four innocent people with him.

Almost including Sam. Damaging Sam's pal Jackie enough to send her into months of plastic surgery. So Sam's not exactly unwilling to do the poking around Joe wants him to do, except for his ritual growls and grumbles about ungrateful, illegal, obnoxious...you know the stuff, you have to love at least one curmudgeon, all bark and no bite.

Sam gets to know the vaporized dude's wack-job wife, the sibling rivalry-ridden younger brother, the local up-island mobster, an FBI agent named Ig, and a selection of his billionaire buddy's fellow too-rich-to-steal set. Along the way, Jackie has more surgery to fix the damage the blast did, Joe gets stabbed in Sam's front yard, Sam beats the crap out of some stupid small-time muscle working for the mobster, and puzzles together the damnedest, most WTF solution to this nasty crime that you can't imagine.

Oh. Amanda comes home, and moves in next door to Sam. Like he doesn't have enough trouble.

I like noir novels. I like stuff set in places I know well. I like guys like Sam, who move through the world fixing shit somebody else broke because they can.

I like simple sentences telling exciting stories, and characters whose motivations aren't obscure or blatant, but grayscaled and textured. I like books that make the experience of reading them effortlessly fun.

I think it's a damn shame that Chris Knopf's name doesn't carry the same “oh, yeah!” response that Steve Berry's does. He deserves to. He writes well, he plots well (there are some holes in this tale, but not more than niggling ones I can't specify without serious spoilering, and some underused characters like Jackie and Ig mentioned above), he decides to tell a particular story and that's what he does from beginning through the middle to the end.

Need something to read for a summer afternoon? Want to be satisfied, at the end of the book, that Right was done? Read Two Time. Populist anti-hoity-toity tract that it is, no one goes home unscathed or unvindicated, and the privilege of the Privileged Class takes it on several of their chins.


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THE LAST REFUGE, Noir fiction set in...the HAMPTONS?!

THE LAST REFUGE (Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery #1)
Chris Knopf
The Permanent Press
$20.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Sam Acquillo's at the end of the line. A middle-aged corporate dropout living in his dead parent's ramshackle cottage in Southampton's North Sea, Sam has abandoned friends, family and a big-time career to sit on his porch, drink vodka and stare at the Little Peconic Bay. But then the old lady next door ends up floating dead in her bathtub and it seems like Sam's the only who wonders why. Despite himself, burned-out, busted up and cynical, the ex-engineer, ex-professional boxer, ex-loving father and husband finds himself uncovering secrets no one could have imagined, least of all Sam himself.

Meanwhile, a procession of quirky character intrudes on Sam's misanthropic way--a beautiful banker, pot-smoking lawyer, bug-eyed fisherman and gay billionaire join a full complement of cops, thugs and local luminaries, the likes of which you never knew inhabited the hidden corners of the storied Hamptons: haves, have-nots and want-to-have-at-all-costs. Some deadly. Like Dr. Gernard Ricux in Camus' The Plague, tragedy has given Sam Acquillo an excuse to go on living-if for no other reason than to satisfy his curiosity, and may be buy a little time before succumbing to the existential despair that has brought him to the brink.

My Review: Damaged systems engineer, divorced dad, and all-around working class hero Sam Acquillo retreats to his parents' old cabin in North Sea, a part of Southampton Township that us rich white folk used to call "Blackhampton", aka the working class part of New York's trendy and eternally inflating Hamptons. Sam's licking his wounds after a messy divorce from Boston/Connecticut Aryan-from-Darien Abby, and his scandalous separation from his Fortune 500 corporate employer, after beating up the revolting toady who wants to sell Sam's division to the highest bidder without regard to its consequences for the engineers he supervises.

Sam's horrible old-lady neighbor, Regina, dies; she's got no heirs, she's got no money, she doesn't even own the home she's occupied for over 50 years. And Sam, who has nothing but time on his hands, doesn't buy the manner of her death: she drowned in her bathtub. Problem is, she had severe arthritis, and used the cottage's (separate) shower. This gets Sam's problem-solving brain occupied for the first time since his divorce. And thereby hangs the tale of the first-ever Long Island Noir mystery novel. What he discovers during his nosing about the facts and the fallacies of his tiny North Sea peninsula neighborhood's past and present makes him appreciate anew the peace and solitude he left behind when he chose to become the champion of truth and justice and the populist way; he cannot go back and he doesn't want to go forward, yet he knows he must make his choice. And so he does. And nothing in North Sea can ever be the same.

Oh wow. What a fun ride! What a delight to have this book that harks back to the Dashiell Hammett "Continental Op" books! And all set here on Long Island, mah home! I loved reading the author's supple, decriptive prose; I loved the author's ability to make me invest in and care for the flawed hero main character, and I was bowled over by the clear-eyed populism of the author's presentation of the social issues plaguing the Hamptons. I have friends in East Hampton who experience the world in the same way as Sam Acquillo does. It's very exciting to see that on the page, as anyone who's read a book that "gets it right" about their home partch can tell you.

Then there's the modern dearth of real, heartfelt NOIR in fiction and movie-making. Characters who've lost everything, and so can't be scared. Situations that're based in the real concerns of real people. Problems that have no counterpart in most mysteries and thrillers, but should.

Okay. That's the upside.

Then there's the downsside. The copyediting **rots**. "Noyac Rd." in ****dialogue**** oofwince...and on the facing page, "Harbor Road." Oh now really. You can get it right on one page and not on the other? grrrrrrr

The gawdawful spelling mistakes! The parallelism errors. *wince*

But in the end, well, the beauty of the book is simply in its characters and its ability to draw you into its lie-filled world. Sam, his love interest Eddie the dog, and the women who want them are deeply involving. I care about them, and I want to read more about them.


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