Showing results by author "Andrew Vachss" in All Categories

When the former shot-caller of the country's most feared white supremacist prison gang contacts Burke, he comes with references...and the promise of a huge score. Terminally ill, the ex-con needs major cash to gamble on the long-shot possibility of a cure that's available only in Switzerland.

Burke, ex-con, mercenary, and rumored hit man, makes his living by preying on New York’s most vicious predators and occasionally avenging their innocent victims. But in Andrew Vachss’s mercilessly suspenseful new novel, Burke finds himself working the other side of the street, where guilt and innocence are as disposable as the sheets in a Times Square hotel . . . and as dirty. Burke’s new employer is Kite, a fanatical crusader who specializes in debunking “false allegations” of child sexual abuse.

Ho was a revered sensei, but when his dismissive arrogance caused the death of a beloved student, he renounced not only his possessions but also his role as master, and now roams the streets in search of a way to atone. Drawn by his presence, a group forms around him.

Once a devastated mill town, by 1959 Locke City has established itself as a thriving center of vice tourism. The city is controlled by boss Royal Beaumont, who took it by force many years ago and has held it against all comers since.

In Footsteps of the Hawk Burke himself is in danger of becoming a victim. Two rogue cops are stalking him. The coolly seductive Belinda Roberts wants him to free a man charged with a grisly string of rape-murders. The brutal and half-crazy Detective Jorge Morales may be trying to frame Burke for the same crimes.

In the figure of Burke, Andrew Vachss has given contemporary crime fiction one of its most mesmerizing characters. An abused child raised in orphanages, foster homes, and prisons, Burke is a career criminal and outlaw who steals and scams for a living. But he draws the line at the psychopaths and predators who stalk children. Sometimes he draws that line in blood.

The acclaimed and ground breaking collection of short stories, poetry, and allegory by Andrew Vachss, one of the most powerful voices in the field of child protection. This work is an illumination of the realities of child abuse, juvenile violence...and tribute to the power of imagination. People Magazine says, "Another Chance is Dr. Seuss dressed up as a Scorsese movie, another on-target hit by an author who has made children his primary concern."

After a life in various war zones, Dell and Dolly have settled in this town, fulfilling Dolly's lifelong dream. Though she has given up her nursing career and moved smoothly into civilian life, Dell had been a mercenary, so they both have to sacrifice their prior identities. When the star of the girls' softball team shoots and kills the most popular boy in school, Dolly asks Dell to uncover the motive behind this inexplicable crime. It doesn't take him long to uncover a horrifying rite of passage.

When his girlfriend, Crystal Beth, is gunned down at a gay rights rally in Central Park, Burke, the underground man-for-hire and expert hunter of predators, vows vengeance. But someone beats him to the task: a shadowy killer who calls himself Homo Erectus and who seems determined to wipe gay bashers from the face of the earth. As the killer’s body count rises, most citizens are horrified, but a few see him as a hero, and they hire Burke to track him down... and help him escape.

After pleading guilty to a series of homicides, Esau Till sits on death row, writing his life story. But his memoir is his one last chance to protect his brother. And, when it comes to his baby brother, Esau Till is a man without boundaries. When the genetic cards were dealt, Esau drew a genius IQ - and a crippled body. His brother Tory drew a slow mind - and almost superhuman strength. Very early on, Esau learned that the only way to guarantee his brother's safety was to make himself indispensable, so he became the top hired killer for both rival local mobs.

A hit man stalks his mark at a race track. A sociopath crosses every moral boundary to become a published author. An ex-mercenary obsessively defends his "perimeter" from a dangerous interloper. A man for hire grudgingly accepts help from a teenage girl to track an online predator. In a dystopian future, young people struggle for survival underground, forming themselves into vicious gangs with only the graffiti of the "last journalists" accepted as truth. Andrew Vachss collects 20 tight, powerful stories - all from the past decade of his career, including some now published for the first time - along with an original screenplay.

What — or who — could turn a gifted little boy into a murderous thing that calls itself "Satan’s Child"? In search of an answer, a man named Burke travels from a festering welfare hotel to a neat frame house where a voodoo priestess presides over a congregation of assassins. For this vigilante and unlicensed private eye has made it his business to defend the small victims whom the law has failed — even a child who has been made into a killer.

Undercurrents rise to the surface as Dell employs his mercenary soldier skills to follow the trail of a man who unwisely threatened his beloved wife, Dolly. This is a man with the deadly patience of a gila monster and a complex agenda: possibly the first partner in literature who tries to pass as a gay man, as a light-skinned person of color would have passed for white decades ago.

Andrew Vachss is a lawyer who represents children and youths exclusively. His many books include the Burke series and two collections of short stories, and his work has appeared in Parade, Antaeus, Esquire, Playboy, and The New York Times, among other publications. A native New Yorker, he divides his time between the city of his birth and the Pacific Northwest.

Cross and his strange but multi-talented crew together form one of the most ruthless and efficient hired guns the world has known. In this first appearance in a novel, they take on an elusive serial killer who no one has ever seen. This savage murderer is leaving a trail of eviscerated bodies all over the world

For all secrets created, a tiny percentage is kept against any intrusion. The ultimate extractor of such secrets is the Questioner - a man who has trained himself to become empty, who uses that emptiness to listen fully, to sense what others need to hear, to respond in ways that lead them to reveal their most protected thoughts. Disdaining torture or coercion, he mines those secrets with nothing more than conversation. The secrets he learns can create or topple empires, win or destroy fortunes, lubricate the gears of the world...or grind them to a halt.