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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SAVING THE HOOKER, a lot funnier than the films it satirizes!

SAVING THE HOOKER
MICHAEL ADELBERG
The Permanent Press
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Matthew Hristahalois (Hrist-a-hal-E-os) is a not so scholarly scholar. He's obsessed with the "Hooker with a Heart of Gold" character that keeps turning up in movies like Pretty Woman and The Hangover—the beautiful and kind fallen woman who can only be saved by Prince Charming. Matthew wins a post-doc to see if real fallen women can be saved by a good man. He casts himself as Prince Charming and sets out to study and rehabilitate real New York City prostitutes, at least until he meets a fiery auburn-haired prostitute who calls herself Julia Roberts.

Saving the Hooker is a fast-paced assault on male hubris and the recycled fairy tales at the core of so many of our favorite books and movies. It is also a bawdy tour of lower Manhattan's escort service prostitution scene, a poke in the eye of academic orthodoxy, and a not-so-subtle send up of cable television talk-news. Centered on the combustible relationship between Matthew and Julia, Saving the Hooker makes comic hash out of modern America's show horse institutions and sacred cow issues: academia, high and low media, political correctness, misogyny, and sexual assault.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: I don't at all enjoy the way women are portrayed in major-budget films. They're scheming scum, out to hurt every man they meet, or they're saintly supporters, human jock straps meant to keep Their Man's balls in the air no matter how hard gravity pulls on 'em. Thus there are mothers and wives, there are sex workers and assistants; there are not rivals and partners.

This sends the message that women exist for men, and have no valid existence aside from their relations with men. That being arrant nonsense, I long ago stopped enjoying any film that doesn't pass the Bechdel Test, and there are precious few of them. As the years pass, and as I grow to realize how few women actually think about men all that much, I realize that someone like Michael Adelberg is on to something. He's also almost alone in talking about it. I hope he's not as alone in thinking about it.

Sadly I suspect that he is.

I lied to my father about having a real girlfriend: I conned my old friends into thinking I was a dude with fun friends; and I pulled this off by financing sexual favors, including the loss of my own virginity, with the center’s research funds.

What makes the story of Matthew's search for the roots of the "Hooker with a Heart of Gold" tale as funny as it is, is the pace the author sustains. Humor needs speed. Slow, ponderous things aren't usually funny, or at least not intentionally. Here we're careening all around Manhattan as Matthew bounces off the pachinko bumpers of misogyny (presented humorously but not played for laughs) and its stablemate political correctness...condescending mealy-mouthed nonsense with a genuinely important impetus, to stop cruel and belittling stereotyping...thus ramming at speed into clueless men and resigned, angrily despairing women.

For four nights, I imagined introducing myself to Ms. Caliente and telling her that I was a researcher. I imagined buying her a cup of coffee and talking with her about Mexico and how she fell into hooking. I imagined her telling me that I was the first truly nice man she’d ever known.

Matthew's Pilgrim's Progress is speeded up by the connections his academic focus makes a variety of stake-holders take an interest in his purpose. The "Wolf News Channel" episode made me laugh very scornfully, I admit. But the problem, as any grown-up knows, is that this lifestyle is expensive and deep pockets aren't common in academia...or not for very long, anyway. And worst of all, when he snags a perfect research subject he discovers that he's what he always was: A means to someone else's end.

This is a funny, bitter, cynical read that has big ambitions and only just falls short of realizing them fully. While Matthew's research is on the right track, he's still just a guy without a clue when it comes to women. He doesn't see, and doesn't see that he doesn't see, the hard truth that he comes across as the kid who fell off the pickle truck as it made a hard left onto Tenth Avenue. When life makes it too obvious for him to ignore, he responds in the stereotypical man way.

I trust all my readers will remember why The Pilgrim's Progress came to be. Now apply that here. And there you have the missing stars! Not everyone will feel as I do, so by all means adventure a bit and pick one up.

I got so much of what I wanted that I'm really annoyed I didn't get it all.