Chris Knopf

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...

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...

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...

Sam Acquillo, ex-boxer, ex-corporate executive, and accidental hero of The Last Refuge, can't seem to stay out of trouble....

Sam is at the end of the line: he's a middle-aged corporate dropout living in a ramshackle cottage. But then the old lady next door ends up dead, and Sam is the only one who wonders why....

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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....

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 Burton Lewis, a certified billionaire...

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...

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...

Gwendalynn Anders, a midwestern girl who’s never seen the ocean, wonders what was in that joint she smoked a week before waking up on Elysiana and why it feels like the trip will last the entire summer of 1969. Jack Halcyon, living atop an abandoned twenty-story hotel, wonders how he’s able...

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...