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Michael W. Higgins

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Chris Knopf's Sam Acquillo is an unusual type of detective. Hard Stop is the fourth in a series and there are striking biographical commonalities between the created and the creator. Actually Acquillo is a detective more by default rather than by training or by design. Still, he is an effective sleuth for all that.

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Divorced - and quite messily - with a daughter he dotes on living in Manhattan, keen on perfecting his carpentry skills in the Hamptons, on splendid - if unorthodox terms - with the local police (with one notable exception, that is), on intimate terms with an array of staggeringly beautiful women - rich, professional and artistic to boot, Acquillo's life has about it an air of romantic vagabondage, of rough-hewn insouciance.

But there is poignant self-awareness too:

Most people are too polite to ask why I flamed out on the upward arc of my career, why I demolished my marriage and laid waste any future professional prospects. The fact is, I'm not sure why. Or, I'm not ready to understand why. I know it's supposed to be a big deal to me, this thing that happened. I don't deny that, but I am not sure any good can come from dissecting my motivations, plumbing the depths of my soul, my essential being, to root out fundamental, underlying causes.

All I can say is I used to wake in the morning feeling a rich blend of panic and hollow despair. Now I'm merely undecided.

Admittedly, in passages like these, Acquillo sounds like an unruly blend of Soren Kierkegaard and Woody Allen. But he is not quite the tart-tongued philosopher he fancies himself. He is both more complex and interesting.

Sam is also an engineer who has been swindled, terminated (in terms of employment), threatened, assaulted, and all by his former employer. Not a healthy work relationship. Living in his cottage on the Little Peconic Bay - idyllic on the surface but deadly underneath - Acquillo is trying to put his life back together following a string of work-related traumas. It isn't quite working.

Although he has the serenity of the bay, the rustic charm of his cottage, the comforts of his dog Eddie, his daily ration of Camels and Absolut and his favourite local diners, ranging from the nondescript to the impossibly elegant, he also has some uninvited rough company, a savage murder, a grisly accident, a pervading menace and two villainous Venezuelan assassins to contend with.

Not much downtime.

Acquillo is an intriguing concoction of James Bond, Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. He is in turn seductive, tender, cocky and pugilistic. He is a tough guy with a taste for smart repartee and a literary sensibility. While approaching the digs of the improbably named Zelda Fitzgerald he quips: "I was braced for Jay Gatsby. What I got was Brothers Grimm."

As he pursues the various clues that will lead him to the killer of the mysterious and tragic Iku Kinjo - a corporate wunderkind who perishes at the hands of Acquillo's former acquaintances - Sam betrays a logic of the heart rather uncommon among the mandarins of monied power:

No willful murder is justified, but hers (Kinjo's) felt less an act of butchery than a surgical elimination. A tactical execution.

Maybe that's all it was, a simple transaction. A line item on the profit and loss statement. Case closed. Meeting over. The ultimate hard stop.

Michael W. Higgins is president of St. Thomas University in Fredericton, and an author and broadcaster.