Sam Acquillo is a man accustomed to living within dispirit worlds.  His childhood was split between the North Sea area of Southampton on Long Island’s East End, and the Bronx, where his father owned a truck repair shop.  The North Sea cottage was within the same socio-economic stratum, built in a neighborhood established by working-class people from the city, though the physical environment couldn’t have been more different.  He became a boxer, turning pro to pay his way through MIT, setting him on a course that ended with a career running R&D for a giant engineering firm, until he blew it all by punching the company’s CFO in the nose.  House, wife and job all gone, he returned to North Sea, committed to a regimen of self-destruction.  Solving the case of a dead old lady, and the advent of a romance with a Southampton heiress, renewed his will to live, and launched eight more murder investigations, tangled relationships, fist fights, gun play, philosophical ruminations and a deepening web of close associations, the deepest probably with his dog Eddie Van Halen.    

            Knopf’s seventeen mystery thrillers have earned multiple starred reviews from the leading pre-publication journals (Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, Library Journal), been named on “Best Of” lists by the New York Times and Boston Globe, and major crime fiction publications, including Mystery Scene, Deadly Pleasures and Crime Scene.  His novel Head Wounds won the Benjamin Franklin Award for Best Mystery, and Dead Anyway won the 2013 Nero Award.  He’s been translated/published in Italy, Spain, Germany, Japan, China, and the UK, with minimal translation.  All his books can be found on Blackstone Audio, and most have appeared in large-type versions.

            His short story, Kill Switch, was short-listed for the 2016 Derringer Award.  Other stories have appeared in the Akashic Noir Series, Best New England Short Stories and Alfred Hitchcock Magazine.