Last Refuge: A Tale of Money and Murder in the Hamptons by Chris Knopf

From the Publisher

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.

The New York Times - Marilyn Stasio

While his low-key investigation is only minimally suspenseful, the characters he chats up are such original oddballs and their conversation so bracing that you want to kick off your shoes and spend some time on the porch with them, just taking in the view and enjoying the talk.

Publishers Weekly

Sam Acquillo, the hero of Knopf's arresting debut (a Book Sense notable selection for May), is the very epitome of the dropout. An ex-corporation man, divorced from his wife and estranged from his daughter, he lives in his parents' run-down cottage in Southampton, Long Island, and seems content to drink himself into oblivion. Then one day he finds the black and swollen body of his elderly neighbor, Regina Broadhurst, who has apparently drowned in her bathtub. Is it an accident or murder? And if it's the latter, will solving the mystery behind Regina's death enable Sam to pick up the pieces of his life and move on? While the promotional copy's likening the book to Camus's The Plague may be a stretch, there's a definite whiff of Elmore Leonard here, particularly in the snappy dialogue and the colorful, oddball characters, including a gay billionaire. Knopf's effortless narrative style and sense of humor bode well for the further adventures of Sam Acquillo. (May 24) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A simmering midlife dropout's attempt to live below the radar in the Hamptons is torpedoed when the old lady next door dies. There's no reason to assume that Regina Broadbent, floating in her bathtub, died anything but a natural death-unless you happen to know that almost any plug would have let the water empty several days ago and that Regina's arthritis confined her to showers. Sam Acquillo knows the first of these because he used to work as an industrial designer, and the second because Regina's practically the only person he's been connected to since his wife and daughter left him after he punched out the board chairman. The latter was plotting to sell his cash-cow corporate division out from under him. Because Sam has little to do but tinker around his house and sip vodka, it's no trouble for him to accost Regina's surly nephew and suggest that he appoint Sam administrator of her estate, and then to poke around enough to find that Regina didn't own her house but didn't pay rent either. In fact, Regina's life, which seemed even quieter than Sam's, barely kept the lid on an elaborate scheme Sam and his more-than-personal banker Amanda Battiston will expose if only they aren't stopped by some menacing types you wouldn't expect in such a high-rent district. In this first of a series, Knopf turns a mean sentence, and his debut manages to make Sam's charged flashbacks more interesting than the main event.

Product Details

• ISBN: 1579621376
  
• ISBN-13: 9781579621377
• Format: Paperback
• Publisher: Permanent Press, The
• Pub. Date: December 2005
• Sales Rank: 240,930
• Series: Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery Series

• Read an Excerpt

Read an Excerpt

My father built this cottage at the tip of Oak Point on the Little Peconic Bay in the Town of Southampton, Long Island, in the mid-1940s when there was nobody else around to build anything. They were all still at war, most of the young guys anyway, and the older guys were either too poor or too scared of the future – or too damaged by the Depression – to take a chance. But my dad had vision before people called it that, and he bought this nine-tenths of an acre parcel right at the edge of the bay. Waterfront, they call it now. Then it was called stupid and expensive, even though it only cost about $560 a lot.

The price of this kind of property has gone up a lot since then.

He built the house himself, a little at a time, without a mortgage. The first year he dug the foundation with a pick and shovel, laid up cinder block and put on the first floor deck. Then he built the rest of the house room by room as he got the money, and the building materials, most of which he scrounged out of local dumps and empty lots and the handful of construction projects that were going on at the time around the city and out on the Island.

He was too old for the war, but he fought plenty at home. My dad wasn’t a nice guy. He was a real bastard actually, but he treated me okay, most of the time.

I live in this place now, by myself. I was born about the time my father winterized the cottage, so for all intents and purposes, this is where I grew up. We also had an apartment in the Bronx where he stayed during the week, but my mother and my sister and I lived on the bay year round after he installed the oil furnace. I don’t remember ever being in theBronx, though he used to tell me about the room I had, and how my sister and I played in the backyard around the crabgrass and sumac trees, until “the Negroes all moved in and scared away the regular people.” That was more or less how he put it, speaking the words with an acid fury. He was an active racist, like all the people of my father’s generation I knew growing up.

All I remember of my childhood is the restless water and neon sunset sky of the bay. The persistent breeze that could suddenly snap into hysteria and the smell of rotting sea life at low tide. I’m breathing it in now, and sometimes it seems like life’s only durable reference point.

The cottage is all on one floor, with a corner-to-­corner screened-in front porch facing the Little Peconic. It’s the best room in the house, and it’s where I sleep all year round. Beginning about early April, till a little before Christmas, I leave off the storm windows. That was why I could always hear Regina Broadhurst moaning in the night. She slept with her windows open as well, and since her house was right next door, the only thing to stop the noise were the cicadas, the flip-flip of the little bay waves and about five hundred feet of windswept Long Island air.

When my mother died, I called a local used furniture guy to come over and take everything out of the house. Occasionally I see one of our things for sale in the window of an antiques store, or the thrift shop on Main Street, depending on its perceived value. I got two thousand dollars for the whole thing, which included hauling it away. They had to take a lot of stuff they didn’t want, but that was part of the deal.

I held on to my dad’s ’67 Pontiac Grand Prix. I keep it running and drive it around the eastern end of the Island. I try to stick to the back roads during the summer season. The big stupid car has a huge engine. Traffic makes it overheat.

Because it’s so big and improbably shaped, people don’t realize that the ’67 Grand Prix was one of the fastest production cars Detroit ever made. My dad and I retrofitted it with a 4-speed from a GTO, which made it even faster. I let the paint fade into the undercoat, but I patch the rust holes as they surface. It’s something to do.

My dad never appreciated the car like I did. He really only got a few good years out of it before those guys beat him to death down at the neighborhood bar in the city where he used to hang out.

After the furniture guy stripped the cottage, I stripped the paint my mother had put over the old varnished knotty pine that covers the walls. She’d done it to get back at my father for getting killed and leaving her alone on a permanent basis, not just during the week. I revarnished it and bought a new couch and a woodstove for the living room. Also a kitchen table and chairs, and a bed for the screened-in porch. I haven’t got around to doing anything else, but the little cottage feels bigger, and even echoes a little, and at least it’s wiped clean of the cluttered, congealed misery of my parents’ lives.

This all happened about four years ago after I came out here to stay. The place had been empty for a while – my mother spent her last years imploding into herself at a nursing home in Riverhead. My sister saw her more often than I did, even though she had to fly in from Wisconsin. I said I was too busy at the company to break away, but actually I couldn’t stand to see my mother in that place surrounded by all those demented, hollowed-out mummies. Or suffer the reproach I always imagined I saw in the contour of my mother’s set jaw.