Chris Knopf Books In Order

The Last Refuge

Available in Canada for the first time a compelling debut from a fresh new voice in crime fiction. Sam Acquillo’s at the end of the line. A middle aged corporate dropout living in his dead parents ramshackle cottage in the Hamptons, Sam has abandoned his friends, family and a big time career to sit on his porch, drink vodka and stare at the Little Peconic Bay. But when the old lady next door ends up floating dead in her bathtub it seems like Sam is the only one who wonders why. 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 characters intrudes on Sam s misanthropic ways. A beautiful banker, pot smoking lawyer, bug eyed fisherman and gay billionaire join a full complement of cops, thugs and local luminaries in this tale of money and murder.

Two Time

Sam Aquillo 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 Southhampton, Long Island, Two Time is full of moody sunsets, beachfront properties and beautiful people with an extraordinary amount of money and very dangerous secrets.

Head Wounds

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.

From the Hardcover edition.

Hard Stop

Sam Acquillo is getting to be alot more sociable. People are constantly dropping by, including guys in black outfits with . 45 automatics breaking into his cottage in the middle of the night. Though on doctor’s orders to stay clear of violence and mayhem, Sam does what’s needed to encourage a candid conversation with the home invader, with surprising results. Suddenly 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 person important 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 Sam’s cooperation. After finally achieving some measure of peace and contentment on the tip of Oak Point, overlooking the Little Peconic Bay, 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. But this time there’s some added incentive. An opportunity Sam thought he’d never see again. The chance to get a bit of his old life back. The only piece he might actually want. With lawyer Jackie Swaitkowski and cop friend Joe Sullivan reluctantly in tow, and the beautiful Amanda Anselma, fisherman Paul Hodges and mutt Eddie Van Halen eager to lend a hand, Sam is back on the quest. This time with a few ambitions of his own, which lead him into something all his battles in the ring and corporate boardroom could never have preapared him for.

Black Swan

Sailing back from Maine, Sam Acquillo, the hero of four Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mysteries from Permanent Press, 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, NY, a distant and altogether disassociated scrap of Long Island. A summer preserve for the oldest old money in America, and 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 his crew. 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.

Short Squeeze

The outside world thinks living in the Hamptons requires a Bentley, a face lift, and a shingle style home the size of Buckingham Palace. The truth is a lot more complicated than that. Dig a little deeper and you’re as likely to find a saint or a Mensa genius as you are a deviant or certified nut job lurking right below the surface. I know this because these are my beloved clients. Meet Jackie Swaitowski, a smart aleck attorney whose legal turf is supposed to be the buzzing Hamptons real estate market. But when a new client turns up dead, things take a sudden and decidedly dangerous turn. In a client’s pocket is an envelope that contains a shocking piece of evidence that suggests that the death was anything but an accident. Jackie has bigger fish to fry like her old flame Harry’s surprise return to town until a late night car chase changes her priorities. Now she has every reason to believe that the next name on the killer’s list is her own. Chris Knopf has been praised for his quick witted writing and broad knowledge of the highs and lows of Hamptons life, and his books have been included on best of the year lists complied by The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and others. Now, in Short Squeeze, he brings an irresistible new hero*ine to center stage.

Bad Bird

Jackie Swaitkowski may not be the most buttoned up lawyer in the Hamptons, but a plane crash before her very eyes is hard to miss. Just before the struggling air taxi takes a nosedive, its female pilot tosses out a camera case. To Jackie, the accident’s only witness, the case so to speak seems meant for her. The camera’s memory card holds an unusual set of photos. Jackie recognizes more than a few of the faces in those pictures. Are they telling her the story of the crash? The pilot, a hard nosed biker chick named Eugenie Birkson, came from a family tree filled with ex cons, and boasted a passenger list packed with high society. And Jackie soon learns that solving the mystery of Eugenie s death will mean uncovering some dark secrets from her own past as well. All this and a freshly revived romance with gentle giant Harry Goodlander, and Jackie yet again has her heart and her hands full. Award winning mystery writer Chris Knopf returns to Southampton, a one of a kind small town where the rich and the rest of us rub shoulders on a daily basis, generating all the frictions that might imply.

Elysiana

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.