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SHORT SQUEEZE
by Chris Knopf
Minotaur Books, January 2010
288 pages
$24.99
ISBN: 0312551231


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Jackie Swaitkowski is a thirties-something real estate lawyer in Long Island's Hamptons, where real estate is a sacred calling. When she is consulted by an elderly man named Sergey Pontecello to help him evict his sister-in-law from the house they are sharing, she takes the case on. Then Sergey winds up dead following a late night phone call to Jackie complaining that his sister-in-law has locked him out of his bathroom and she feels an obligation to try to find out why his battered body has turned up in the middle of a road. By the time she's through, she's come to know some of the more unsavoury residents of the easternmost end of the island on which she lives, residents who are not to be confused with the Beautiful People who spend their summers there.

Readers familiar with Chris Knopf's Hampton novels starring Sam Acquillo will greet Jackie as an old acquaintance, as she's been on the scene from the beginning as a secondary character. This time, she gets to take centre stage with Sam making only token walk-on appearances. Of course any series author might want to freshen things up by launching a new series, with new personnel and even a change of scene and attempts of this sort ought to be applauded.

But in this case, really rather little has changed. The scene, the year-round Hamptons, is the same, the characters familiar, but most unfortunately, the voice of the narrator is not as distinctively different as it ought to be. Jackie maintains her distinctive behavioural tics from the earlier novels - she smokes both grass and tobacco with enthusiasm, she has a habit of speaking before she thinks, but what she doesn't have is her own voice. She sounds too much like Sam. The character lacks both the specific generational and gender differences that would talk us into accepting her as a character in her own right.

Still, any Chris Knopf Hamptons novel is entertaining and this one, like the others, is very much a day at the beach.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, January 2010

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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