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היכנס לעולם אינסופי של סיפורים

תקשיב ותקרא

Chris Knopf

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.

Keith Szarabajka

Blackstone Publishing

Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mysteries

Black Swan

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.

Cop Job

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.

Back Lash

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 inflame 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.