Mysteries probe Hamptons, Syria
“Troubles make you live longer,” says a bartender to part time PI and full-time cabinet-maker Sam Acquillo. “Then I’m heading for … immortality,” Acquillo replies. And I’m thrilled about that. I spend a lot of my reading time with crime fiction, and I’ve always thought Chris Knopf ’s series set in the Hamptons has yet to realize the level of attention it deserves. So, listen up, my friends. Knopf’s“Tango Down” (The Permanent Press) features a main character with a humanist’s worldview and a rapier wit, and a suspenseful plot with emotional depth. Put it on your TBR pile.
When a wealthy man’s battered body is “discovered by Southampton’s most disenfranchised people,” Sam and his sometimes partner, attorney to the “poor and defenseless” Jackie Swaitkowski, step up because no one else will. Their investigation leads them outside their “Southampton bubble,” beyond their “local horrors” to a place where “evil scales geographically” to something unfathomable.
Knopf’s writing crackles with energy, but one of the elements I appreciate most about this series is that Knopf isn’t afraid to slow down and linger on small emotional moments. For Sam “life is an intricate waltz you have with other human beings.” Sometimes you get trampled, sometimes you don’t. Sam may be a cynic and a skeptic, but he’s not a pessimist. He keeps dancing.
Although still young compared to Knopf ’s series, Canadian human rights law professor Ausma Zehanat Khan’s series with Canadian police inspector Esa Khattack, a devout Muslim who “looks more like a television star than a policeman,” and his sergeant Rachel Getty, whose “personal philosophy (is) liberal in every sense,” has already become a series I regularly seek out. Zehanat Khan’s characters are principled and compassionate, driven to serve the lost, the broken, the betrayed, and her plots explore current global issues with keen insight.
In her latest, “Dangerous Crossing” (Minotaur), a personal friend of Khattack’s goes missing in a Syrian refugee camp where her NGO is operating. What starts as a missing person investigation soon becomes something much worse. The novel presents a highly personal and heartbreakingly profound view of the Syrian refugee crisis. But the dangers of the crossing and the details of life in the camps are not just backdrops for this story, they are the story, and what struck me most when I finished reading was that the shocking conspiracy Khattack and Getty uncover really is fiction.
With his clipped prose, authentic dialogue, and the brutal reality of his plots, David Putnam’s Bruno Johnson series is another exceptional one to follow. Putnam’s books read like pareddown yet jacked-up Joseph Wambaugh procedurals. “The Innocents” (Oceanview Publishing) is Putnam’s latest, and it hums with moral contradictions, terrible choices and a lot of testosterone. This novel is a prequel to the four earlier books in the series. In this one Bruno’s a young officer dropped into an undercover investigation to expose a “murder for hire” conspiracy in an elite robbery homicide squad of the LA Sheriff’s Department. Bruno is both in awe of the “animal cunning and bravado” of those he’s meant to bring down and terrified of the power they wield over his life and his career.
Crafted from the clay of Putnam’s own experiences in law enforcement, this series’ authenticity is undeniable. In his author’s note, Putnam describes how he went from idealizing men and women wearing the badge to experiencing a “slow decline of that high moral expectation.” In “The Innocents” good people do bad things and bad people do good, but in both situations someone always dies.