Chris Knopf’s mystery novels have received exceptional awards and accolades, with critics likening his character Sam Aquillo to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, while repeatedly comparing Knopf’s work to that of Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, and Ross Macdonald. Two Time was one of thirteen mysteries listed as recommended summer reading in the New York Times Book Review, and Publishers Weekly chose it as one of the “Best 100 Books for 2006.” Head Wounds won the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Award for Best Mystery. Dead Anyway was listed on the 2012 Best Fiction lists of both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. Knopf is a sailor, cabinetmaker, and advertising executive in Connecticut. He and his wife Mary also spend considerable time at their Long Island home in Southampton.
Back Lash
by Chris Knopf
Paperback
$16.99
- ISBN-13: 9781579624835
- Publisher: The Permanent Press
- Publication date: 05/17/2016
- Pages: 266
- Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)
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s 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, for whom a single, horrific event has helped define his entire existence. Now that event has reached out from the deep past, an unwanted visitor, with secrets within secrets he's forced to unpack like a Russian doll, each more ominous than the one before. What is revealed would be disturbing enough if it wasn't so personal. Not a welcome development for a man who also 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 a temper that stood out even on the mean streets of the city. It's here that Sam learns that evil history doesn't only repeat itself, it can improve upon the original product. 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.
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Publishers Weekly
03/07/2016Early in Knopf’s nicely plotted seventh Sam Acquillo mystery (after 2015’s Cop Job), a stranger calls on the corporation man turned carpenter at his cottage on Long Island’s Little Peconic Bay, to inform him that Marcelo “Bonnie” Bonaventure, an old and ailing retired bartender, wants to talk to him about the beating death 40 years earlier of Sam’s father, André Acquillo, a demanding, ill-tempered, meticulous mechanic. Sam drives to the Bronx to visit Bonnie at an old folks’ home, where Bonnie tells Sam something disturbing about the police investigation into André’s murder. Sam decides to stick around the city to do some digging and consults Madelyn Wollencroft, a cold case detective. When a thug attempts to shoot Sam one night in his hotel room, he realizes that someone doesn’t want the past explored, and he brings Wollencroft actively into the case. Sam must contend with his father’s ghost and his father’s surviving enemies. Sam’s backstory adds depth to an already strong character. (May)
Kirkus Reviews
2016-03-14Sam Acquillo tackles a cold case that arouses his warmest feelings: the murder of his father 40 years ago. Not that Sam was André Acquillo's biggest fan. "If you think I care what happened to my old man, you're wrong," he tells Orfio Pagliero, a mob scion who turned legit but never turned against his own father, Sicilian gangster Leon Pagliero. Orfio has been linked to André's murder by a tip from true-crime writer Trevor Cleary, whose brother, Father Nelson Cleary, Sam's sought out to learn more about a crucifix found at the bar where his father was killed. Sam insists to each of them in turn that he feels nothing but gratitude to the person who ended his father's life, and an overlong but heartfelt series of flashbacks to his childhood and adolescence provides abundant evidence why he would've hated the father who treated him with such casual cruelty. Yet Sam not only allows himself to be talked into reopening this ice-cold case, but persuades Lt. Madelyn Wollencroft, a Bronx cold-case specialist, to join him in his joyless quest. Shaking the trees produces the usual fruit—somebody tails Sam, somebody tries to kill him, and everybody he meets pronounces his name without sounding out the L's—but he persists. By the final revelation he's not only bonded improbably with Wollencroft, but discovered so much more about his family than he ever cared to know that the identification of his father's killer comes as a distinct anticlimax. Though Knopf (Cop Job, 2015, etc.) keeps the pot steadily simmering, this seventh case, middling for the series, is more notable for its human relationships than its whodunit.