Chris Knopf

"As Sam Acquillo tells us in the early pages of Back Lash, 'Not everyone gets to live their adult lives orbiting a central mystery.' But that's how it s been for Sam, for whom a single, horrific event has helped define his entire existence. Now that event has reached out from the deep past, an unwanted visitor, with secrets within secrets he's forced to unpack like a Russian doll, each more ominous than the one before. What is revealed would be disturbing...

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 1%, until his best friend Burton Lewis, a certified billionaire, is dragged into a high-profile death investigation. When Sam's girlfriend Amanda notes, "Didn't Fitzgerald say, 'the rich are different from you and me'?" "Yeah, they...

<p>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 that life aboard a sailboat in the Caribbean, incognito and in love, could be a lasting refuge.</p><p>The death of that illusion was as...