“Back Lash,” Chris Knopf’s new thriller, is nicely named because the protagonist-hero, Sam Acquillo, gets hit with a strong backward force that propels him into the past. Sam’s a cabinet maker in the Hamptons, but he used to be the head of an international research and development tech firm, and a professional boxer, whose winnings put him through MIT. Before that he was a kid living in the Bronx. Sam knows a lot about cars so another meaning of the title “Back Lash” applies — the jarring play between adjacent movable parts as in a series of gears. Cars are central to the narrative of “Back Lash,” especially Sam’s beloved 1967 Pontiac Grand Prix, which used to belong to his father. Readers who know Sam from Knopf’s earlier books love him for his sarcastic mouth — in Latin as well as English — and for his fierce loyalty to friends and his dog.
In “Back Lash” he’s probably close to 60, but he’s still smart and sexy. It’s not necessary to have read the earlier Sam Acquillo books but for those who have, there’s extra pleasure in watching Knopf ingeniously work in exposition. Forty years before the action begins, Sam’s father was murdered in a bar in the Bronx — to no one’s regret, including Sam’s. Andre Acquillo, a skilled mechanic, was a violent, nasty man who didn’t care much for anyone. The case went cold, with most of the principals now long dead. But “Back Lash” opens with the killing, so it’s apparent that Sam will finally have to confront the mystery of his despised father’s murder. The plot involves not only Sam’s reluctant pursuit of the facts, which pulls him away from his bucolic indolence in the Hamptons, his lovely girlfriend, his beloved dog and his boat, “Carpe Manana.” He goes back to the Bronx where he finds himself in immediate danger. There are people out there, with guns, who do not want the murder solved.
Knopf is particularly good creating secondary characters with distinct idiosyncrasies, and in unobtrusively inserting paragraph summaries when the plot gets complicated. Most of all though, he’s good letting Sam make observations, such as “Athletic wear on older people often makes them look older than they really are.” Another is Sam’s musing that we emerge from childhood “without entirely leaving the child behind” and then “succumb to a selective gravitational pull, unwittingly, irresistibly, irretrievably” by finding ourselves attracted to others with similar experiences. Or not, as Newton observed about the dynamics of attraction and repulsion.
As Sam tells a colleague, he became an engineer because he “likes to fix things. Asserting human intellect over the forces of entropy. Find and realign anomalies and malfunction. Ordering chaos.” As much might be said for an author who knows how to keep us entertained while flattering our intelligence.
