Early ReviewersChris Knopf

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Brand-new stories by: Michael Cunningham, Roxana Robinson, Stephen L. Carter, John Crowley, Amy Bloom, Alice Mattison, Chris Knopf, Jonathan Stone, Sarah Pemberton Strong, Karen E. Olson, Jessica Speart, Chandra Prasad, David Rich, and Hirsh Sawhney. New Haven may be best known for Yale University, but its criminal dimensions run as deep as anywhere else on the Eastern Seaboard. Whether the setting is a college campus, the waterfront, East Rock, The Hill, or Wooster Square, the stories in this volume bring the full city to life—and death. From editor Amy Bloom: New Haven in not a tourist kind of town. Yes, if you want to see the Cushing brain collection of 400 brains-in-jars (with another 150 planned for display), including artifacts like the piece of steak signed (if that’s the word)—using an electrosurgical knife—by Ivan Pavlov, and plenty of infant skulls. Also, more transcendently, you can visit beautiful Beinecke Library, a six-story tower of translucent marble, instead of mere glass, protecting the rare books, including my favorite, the Voynich manuscript, written centuries ago in what seems to be a fictional language with drawings of plants that don’t exist. Also, for the picnickers, the tomb of Midnight Mary in the eighty-five-acre Evergreen Cemetery, right off Ella T. Grasso Boulevard. On her gravestone, it reads: The people shall be troubled at midnight and pass away. It’s a noir kind of town. I love New Haven. I asked other writers who have the same odd, deep affection for the city that I do to tell me their stories. Michael Cunningham, Roxana Robinson, Stephen L. Carter, Alice Mattison, John Crowley. And more. We’ve got the darkly funny, the darker, the ineffable, and the deeply brooding. What we’ve got for you, right here . . . is New Haven.

When market researcher Arthur Cathcart emerged from a coma and set out to track down whoever murdered his wife, the results were far from pre-ordained. Wounded and alone, grief-stricken and hiding off the gris, he thought the only mystery was who killed Florencia, and why. But the quest for justice uncovered a host of fresh mysteries, just beginning with an elaborate fraud and embezzlement scheme, complete with dummy corporations and off-shore numbered accounts. So in place of "who killed Florencia?" he was forced to ask "who was Florencia?" There was nothing about their lives together that answered this or any of a thousand questions she left behind. All he really knew was she came from Chile, had a knack for figures and owned her own insurance agency. So Arthur takes off again to do what he knew he did best: Finding stuff out. What follows is a chase around the world, from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean, and remote parts north and south. No longer alone, with Natsumi Fitzgerald at his side, armed with a portfolio of false identities, hard-learned tradecraft and the continued cloak of anonymity, Cathcart plunges into the world of international terrorism and government intrigue, where the currency is betrayal and the rewards are calculated in blood and revenge.

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. Much easier said than done in the post-9/11 world, where everything about yourself and all the tools you need to live a modern life are an open book. How do you become a different person, how do you finance an elaborate scheme without revealing yourself? How do you force a reckoning with the worst people on earth, as a dead man? Mystery writer CHRIS KNOPF, who has examined complex what-if's through the five Sam Acquillo and three Jackie Swaitowski Hamptons Mysteries, tackles these intriguing questions in a tale of mindless venality, phantom identity, impossible obstacles and the triumph of intellect and imagination over brute force.

Sailing back from Maine, Sam Acquillo, the hero of four Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mysteries, his girlfriend Amanda Anselma and screwball mutt, 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, NY, a distant and altogether disassociated scrap of Long Island. A summer preserve for the oldest old money in America, and 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 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 his crew. 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.

Gwendalynn Anders, a mid-Western 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 to ponder the incongruities of life after leaving a big chunk of his brain at the scene of an accident. Borough Council President Norman Harlan wonders what cruel God put him on an equal footing with Avery Volpe, the fearsome Captain of the Beach Patrol. 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. Where cops, criminals, prodigies, and the promiscuous find themselves at the haphazard mercy of a lunatic providence. Other players include a globe-trotting whiz kid, an Italo-Hispanic crime boss, a surfing aesthete and his vulgar roommate, a career car stereo thief, and a seven-year-old girl who’s probably spent too much time with the dead bodies in the dunes. 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. Elysiana is both a fabulist’s look at a lost time and place and a hurtling thriller. It’s a tale of two types of transition—the personal and the grand. All played out within the isolated magic of a barrier island.

Sam Acquillo is getting to be a lot more sociable. People are constantly dropping by, including guys in black outfits with .45 automatics breaking into his cottage in the middle of the night. Though on doctor’s orders to stay clear of violence and mayhem, Sam does what’s needed to encourage a candid conversation with the home invader, with surprising results. Suddenly Sam’s past reaches out to pull him back into the world of big money and even bigger egos, where the term “corporate intrigue” is redundant and ambition the only virtue. It seems a person important to the private life of a very important person has gone missing in the Hamptons. And it looks like the best way to get her back is to extort Sam’s cooperation. After finally achieving some measure of peace and contentment on the tip of Oak Point, overlooking the Little Peconic Bay, Sam 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. But this time there’s some added incentive. An opportunity Sam thought he’d never see again. The chance to get a piece of his old life back. The only piece he might actually want. With lawyer Jackie Swaitkowski and cop friend Joe Sullivan reluctantly in tow, and the beautiful Amanda Anselma, fisherman Paul Hodges and mutt Eddie Van Halen eager to lend a hand, Sam is back on the quest. This time with a few ambitions of his own, which lead him into something all his battles in the ring and corporate boardroom could never have prepared him for.