Showing results by author "Knopf" in All Categories

Sam Acquillo is at the end of the line: he's a middle-aged corporate dropout living in a ramshackle cottage in Southampton's North Sea. But then the old lady next door ends up floating dead in her bathtub, and it seems that Sam is the only one who wonders why.

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.

Sam Acquillo, 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, he is drawn into the investigation.

Imagine this: You have a nice life. You love your beautiful, successful wife. You’re an easygoing guy working out of your comfortable Connecticut home. The world is an interesting, pleasant place. Then in seconds, it’s all gone. You’re still alive, but the world thinks you’re dead. And now you have to decide: make it official, or go after the evil that took it all away from you. Arthur Cathcart, market researcher and occasional finder of missing persons, decides to live on and fight by doing what he knows best - figuring things out without revealing his status as a living, breathing human being.

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.

Organizational psychologist Dr. Waters is a happily solitary guy with a few deep attachments, including to his boss Paresh Rajput, the owner of a thriving hi-tech aerospace company. Until something really bad happens to CEO Rajput, which throws Waters into a lunatic swirl of murderous stalkers, corporate intrigue, amorous female executives, and crafty cops who see the inscrutable psychologist as murder suspect number one.

The Will of God could be the single most misunderstood topic in all of theology. Yet every believer ponders the Will of God and seeks to understand how it may be determining the details of their life. We reference the Will of God with statements like, "Everything happens for a reason." "If it’s God's Will, then it will happen." "God’s Will always prevails." "It’s impossible to be outside the Will of God" "God is in control." The truth is, every one of these statements is entirely unbiblical. Much of our modern understanding on the Will of God is actually philosophical more than it is ...

When market researcher Arthur Cathcart emerged from a coma and set out to track down whoever murdered his wife, the results were far from preordained. Wounded and alone, grief stricken and hiding off the grid, he thought the only mystery was who killed Florencia - and why. But the quest for justice uncovers a host of fresh mysteries, beginning with an elaborate fraud and embezzlement scheme, complete with dummy corporations and offshore numbered accounts.

Meet Vincent Steele. Successful lawyer, devoted husband, and loving father. On the surface, he has it all. But if you dig deeper, nothing is as it seems. Meet Shelby Hunter. Coming from a different walk of life, she faces her own struggles. Flirtation turns into lust. Lust turns into longing, and longing breaks boundaries. She makes him come alive. He makes her feel treasured.

Arthur Cathcart and Natsumi Fitzgerald wanted to believe they were free of the nearly invisible, malignant forces they had pursued, and been pursued by, across continents and oceans. The slightly brain-damaged tech-freak researcher and the blackjack-dealing psychologist had convinced themselves that life aboard a sailboat in the Caribbean, incognito and in love, could be a lasting refuge.

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....

Meet smart-aleck Southampton attorney Jackie Swaitkowski. Her business relies on constant movement of Hamptons' real estate market. After making an odd request to evict his sister-in-law from his home, one of her clients turns up dead. Jackie would have expected that to be the end of it, but an envelope found on the corpse contains an item so unusual that she finds herself working on something bigger, and more dangerous, than real estate.

Jackie Swaitkowski investigates the death of a female pilot who had a family tree filled with ex-cons and a passenger list packed with Hamptons high society. Just before Eugenie Conklin's plane took a nosedive, she tossed out a camera case that held an unusual set of photos. While defending Eugenie's husband during the accident investigation, Jackie realizes that she recognizes more than a few of the faces in those pictures.

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.

As Sam Acquillo tells us in the early part 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.

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 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 one percent, until his best friend, a certified billionaire, is dragged into a high-profile death investigation. For some, there is no power without prestige, and no prestige that can't be bought. The rich can achieve a level of depravity and hate both invisible, and incomprehensible, to the rest of us.

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, 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.

Crime fiction super fan and host Abby Endler talks to the authors behind the crime stories you can’t put down.

My...what gorgeous eyes you have. That is so I can look into your soul, my dear. And what strong arms you have. It is so I can protect you, my darling. Oh, and what mesmerizing lips you have. It is so I can devour you, my sweet. Red is a modern-day retelling of the popular classic Little Red Riding Hood. In this story you meet Scarlett, a young woman whose chance meeting with a stranger completely changed the course of her life, turning it from a fairy tale into a dark disaster.