Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery

Sam Acquillo is a middle-aged corporate dropout living in a ramshackle cottage in Southampton's North Sea, content to sit on his porch, drink vodka, and stare at the bay. But when the old lady next door ends up dead, Sam is the only one who wonders why. While a procession of quirky characters intrudes on Sam's misanthropic ways, he begins uncovering secrets no one could have imagined.

Sam Aquillo—ex-boxer, ex-corporate executive, and accidental hero of The Last Refuge—can't seem to stay out of trouble. All he really wants to do is hammer a few nails into his ramshackle cottage, drink a great deal of vodka, and hang out with his dog, Eddie. But when a car bomb outside a trendy waterfront restaurant kills a prominent financial consultant, injuring Sam and his lawyer friend, Jackie, he is drawn into the investigation. Where the police have met roadblocks, Sam makes inroads with his trademark wit, instinct and charm.

Peel back the glamour 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. 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, a local builder and blundering bully who shares with Sam an irresistible attraction to the beautiful Amanda. When Robbie is murdered, Sam finds himself in the crosshairs of a very determined chief of police.

After finally achieving some measure of peace and contentment on the tip of Oak Point overlooking the Little Peconic Bay, Sam Acquillo 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 piece of his old life back, the only piece he might actually want.

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.

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.

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 enflame 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.

Sam Acquillo has spent most of his time in the Hamptons hanging out with the other half of the moneyed wonderland cops and bartenders, carpenters, store clerks, and firemen. He couldn't care less about the concerns of the 1 percent, until his best friend Burton Lewis, a certified billionaire, is dragged into a high-profile death investigation. A former corporate superstar brought down by the machinations of the grasping class, Sam's not entirely unfamiliar with the cultural norms of super wealth. It's why he retreated to his cottage refuge at the tip of Oak Point Peninsula jutting into the Little Peconic Bay. But in the intervening years, he's engaged with all forms of low-life tough guys and connivers looking for that edge, an easy path into a social order besotted with unattainable yearning. A world where the best revenge is one with no consequences, no penalties, or costs. For some, there is no power without prestige, and no prestige that can't be bought. They see no distinction between corporate profit and high-minded nonprofits, charity being the currency of social preeminence. In Deep Dive, Sam discovers just how right he is. The rich can achieve a level of depravity and hate both invisible, and incomprehensible, to the rest of us.