Jennifer Jackson – Literary Agent

Elysiana by Chris Knopf

Smart dialogue and sharp social observations distinguish this stand-alone thriller from Knopf (Short Squeeze and four other Hamptons mysteries). In the summer of 1969, life on the sunny New Jersey resort island of Elysiana simmers as town cops feud with the beach patrol, fed-up wives elude their slimy husbands, local politicians double-cross each other, lots of dope flows everywhere, and various needy, wounded people—such as a brain-damaged lifeguard, a young woman from Chicago who fled her lecherous dad, and a smalltime criminal who’s also a maniac surfer—look for reasons to go on. Knopf sets up a lot of competing characters capable of semiclever scheming to get what they want, then shows a massive hurricane ripping their plans and their island apart. Like John D. Macdonald or Charles Willeford in a lighter mood, he’s unsentimentally fond of his characters and tentatively hopeful about their ability to salvage something from the wreckage around them. –Publishers Weekly

Elysiana by Chris Knopf

As the 1969 summer season begins on the New Jersey barrier island of Elysiana—“an assortment of seashore amenities and profound dissociation”—the cops and the lifeguards prepare for the annual turf war made necessary by a loopy municipal charter and warring city politicians. A druglord arrives in his GTO to murder a local who stiffed him. A drugged-out Chicago girl figuratively washes up on the beach with no clear memory of how she got there, and a local thief and surfer marvels at the ease of stealing eight-track tape players from cars. A full baker’s dozen major characters swirl and collide as if in Brownian motion, moved by elemental forces like wind and tide and lesser things like work and whim. Signs and portents hint that something life changing, if not quite apocalyptic, will affect them all. Elysiana is a departure for Knopf, whose Sam Acquillo mysteries have won reviewers’ raves, but he nails it. The seemingly shambling plot proves ultimately to be sly, and Knopf’s sweet-spirited style recalls memories spurred by faded home movies of long-ago vacations. His bio says that he was a New Jersey lifeguard back in the day, and he captures the zeitgeist of the Shore perfectly. Every “shoobie” on the beach who eschews MTV’s odious Jersey Shore should be reading Elysiana this season. –Booklist, Starred Review

Short Squeeze by Chris Knopf

Southampton attorney Jackie Swaitkowski, a supporting character in Knopf’s Sam Acquillo series (Head Wounds, Two Time), takes center stage in this series debut as she is hired to help a man resolve an unpleasant domestic situation. His sister-in-law has moved into and taken over his house, convinced she’s the owner because she loaned her late sister money. But the case is not as simple as it appears. Jackie’s client is fatally run down, and when she’s hired to settle his estate, things turn really ugly as it becomes clear to the killer that Jackie is no pushover. VERDICT Readers, fasten your seatbelts for a roller-coaster ride as Knopf’s intelligent, savvy protagonist works her wiles solving whodunit and why. – Library Journal, Starred Review

Short Squeeze: A Mystery

Guilt can be a powerful motivator. After lawyer Jackie Swaitkowski ignores a call from pesky client Sergey Pontecello, who is found dead hours later, she becomes obsessed with determining how the recently-widowed man died. Eventually, her investigation turns up a tangled mess of strange financial transactions, dysfunctional family relationships, a fatal hit-and-run, mysterious body parts, and an extortion plot—not to mention that Jackie herself is threatened with disbarment by various big-wigs who prefer to leave the dirt under the carpet. She’s aided by her best friend, engineer-turned-carpenter Sam Acquillo, and her ex-boyfriend Harry Goodlander, but it’s Jackie, persistent to the point of bull-headedness, who sweeps up the dirt and puts the pieces together. This spin-off features the same vividly evoked Hamptons setting and the same crisp prose, brisk plotting, and sharp dialogue as Knopf’s critically acclaimed Sam Acquillo series, but here center stage switches from ex-boxer and construction worker Acquillo to a resolute first-person female protagonist who was widowed in her 20s but likes living alone just fine. More engaging hard-boiled crime fiction from a rising star. — Booklist

Short Squeeze: A Mystery

Pot-smoking Jackie Swaitkowski, attorney to sleuthing Southampton carpenter Sam Acquillo (Hard Stop, 2009, etc,), gets a wild, wacky case of her own.

Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but few can rival Sergey Pontecello, his sister-in-law Eunice Wolsonowicz, and her daughter Wendy and adopted son Oscar, aka Fuzzy. His late wife’s sister has taken up residence in his home and won’t budge, Sergey tells Jackie; he wants to evict her. In a subsequent late-night phone call, he complains that Eunice has now locked him out of the master bathroom. Jackie soothes her client only to learn the next day that he’s been found dead, “pretty chewed up,” as Southampton Town cop Joe Sullivan puts it. In one pocket Pontecello is carrying Jackie’s business card, in another a severed nipple that turns out to have been the property of Edna Jackery, a scuba-shop bookkeeper and hit-and-run victim whose body parts have a disconcerting way of escaping the ministrations of family mortician Alden Winthrop III and his son Denny.

Clearly, Watson, these are deep waters, and although no case that kicks off with this kind of a bang can possibly maintain such a sublime level of invention, Knopf does his best to keep his motor-mouthed heroine from stealing the show. All in vain. Manic Jackie may have a law degree and a place in the Hamptons, but she’s still worthy kin to her more downscale Trenton sister Stephanie Plum.

–Kirkus Reviews