Andrew Vachss

They meet in a no-name diner. A shadowy man hands Burke a CD dossier of someone he wants found. Minutes later, as Burke watches from an alley, his client is gunned down by a professional hunter-killer team. Burke slips away, unsure if he's been spotted. Later, when he examines the dossier, he discovers that the missing woman is Beryl Preston, a girl he'd rescued from a brutal pimp twenty years earlier--when she was only thirteen--and returned to her father. Now he has to find her again--not only because she might be in danger, but also because he has to prove to himself that his rescue mission hadn't been financed by a predator who wanted his "property" returned. His search will force him to confront a new kind of human ugliness and, finally, to practice the survivalist triage that has marked--and cursed--his life since childhood. In Mask Market, Burke the outlaw investigator finds himself searching for the truth: not only about a girl named Beryl, but also about himself. This is classic Burke: dark, dangerous, and galvanizing, from the opening scene to the explosive climax.

From the author of the acclaimed Burke private-eye series comes an ambitious and chilling novel that shows us not only what evil is, but where it comes from. For Shella is nothing less than a tour of evil's spawning ground, conducted by one of its natural predators. He is called "Ghost" because he is so nondescript as to be invisible and because he slays with such reflexive ease that he might be one of the dead. Once he traveled with a woman who was called "Shella" -- because those who had treated her as a horrendously ill-used child had tried to make her come out of her shell. Now Shella has vanished in a wilderness of strip clubs and peep shows, and Ghost is looking for her, guided by a killer's instinct and the recognition that can only exist between two people who have been damaged past the point of no return. The result is Andrew Vachss's most compelling work to date, the thriller reimagined as a bleak romance of the damned.

RELENTLESS POWER. HARDCORE ACTION. A CLASSIC, HARD-BOILED VIEW THROUGH A FUTURISTIC LENS. In The City, government is God-in The Sector, anarchy rules.The Membrane stands between those worlds. Some cross it to The Sector, seeking the forbidden. Some cross it to The City, seeking a chance to see the sky. Some try to stay. Most die trying.In a world without paper, names are earned. Sector-born Carbon once risked everything for a chance to live in The City, a world with fresh paper and retinal enhancements that required a price beyond the ability of any Sector-born to earn alone. Captured, he entered prison.Now, released to find a killer whose pattern threatens the government itself, Carbon's real search is for the money stashed by his former gang.But only one woman knows that location, and she isn't willing to trade information unless she gets something in return-her abducted child. The child is somewhere in the Pure Zone, a wild place where sorcery works but firearms do not.Trapped between hostile worlds, Carbon will enter the Pure Zone-hyper-focused and fatal to anyone blocking his path."This is a fantastic departure for Vachss. Lean as a prehistoric corpse and full of magic without an overabundance of gee-gaws and wizard hats. One of his most original and among his best. And that's saying something." - Joe R. Lansdale, Edgar award-winning author of the Hap & Leonard Series"Carbon is a stupendous piece of work, a genre-busting masterpiece that is a whole new direction in fiction. As astonishing as it is compulsively readable and as always with Andrew Vachss, the compassion and empathy for the vulnerable and victimized is heart-wrenching. May be the finest work yet from the master of the art." - Ken Bruen, award winning author of the Jack Taylor Series.

For those too afraid or intimidated by technology to think about where their kids go on the Internet, Andrew Vachss' Blood Line will rock you to your core. In the world of dangerous men, a blood line is a cause passed from generation to generation from master to prot g . But on the path to becoming a master, each prot g must find their own hunting ground... When a young girl is lured away by an Internet predator, the young prot g of an assassin who never leaves a trace decides to leave his own mark by hunting down sexual predators targeting vulnerable teens who are bullied and feeling unwanted.As Sonny discovers his own cause-his own reason for existence-and a skill set beyond anything his master taught him, he steps out of the shadows and joins a long blood line of masters seeking justice on behalf of defenseless children. "An extraordinary thriller ... Vachss never flinches from the horror." -Washington Post Book World

Once a mercenary, later an assassin, and now struggling to maintain a peaceful life, Dell is marked by marrow-deep loyalty and no-limit protective instincts for his wife, Dolly, a former battlefield nurse. When Dolly enters the fray of a neighborhood dispute and receives a thinly veiled threat for her trouble, Dell instantly reverts to guerrilla tactics. His target is George Byron Benton, a prominent local figure who pushes an inscrutable agenda with the deadly patience of a Gila monster--and whose public life may all be an elaborate disguise. Dell is quickly down to cold objectives: decode Benton's end-game, calculate the tactics needed to recapture Dolly's stolen sense of security . . . and execute. With Andrew Vachss's trademark razor-sharp dialogue and inimitable prose style, SignWave--the final entry in the Aftershock trilogy--is guaranteed to reverberate powerfully long after it has been read.

Even the deadliest gangs in Chicagoland fear the Cross Crew and carefully avoid their cinderblock bunker headquarters: Red 71 is well known as the last place you'd want to go . . . unless you're willing to risk it being the last place you'll ever go. The Crew is notorious for its ruthless efficiency and cold-blooded cunning. Why, then, would anyone be foolhardy enough to threaten them-and even more dangerous-their loved ones? As Cross catches the scent of a far-reaching conspiracy, he realizes that it all connects to an unexplained event in his past: a massacre from which he emerged inexplicably unscathed, save for the blue mark on his face that pulses when danger is near. That scar has been throbbing more frequently of late. . . . If he's reading the signs accurately, Cross might find himself again facing a terrible menace that is not altogether human. * MEMOFROM: Captain Nathan Lancaster, Chief, Gang Surveillance UnitTO: All Precincts, Focus Near-North ALERT: Incoming Threats to Cross Crew, Situation Highly Unstable DETAILS: "Cross" and known associates clearly organizing response to perceived pattern of threats. Gang Intelligence indicates high probability of pre-emptive strikes. Report any suspicious and/or unusual activity in Badlands area immediately, gang violence alert level RED.

Dell, a former mercenary, and his wife, Dolly, once a battlefield nurse, believe they have finally found peace in a deceptively idyllic town on the Oregon coast. Until early one morning, when a body washes up on the town's pristine beach. But this no accidental drowning--the corpse is covered with neo-Nazi tattoos . . . and the skull has been fractured with a spike. Eager to close the case before it can hurt tourism, the jumpy D.A. arrests Homer, a harmless schizophrenic whose wristwatch--a gift from God, he says--is engraved with a symbol that exactly matches one of the dead man's tattoos. Mack, the director and sole employee of the local mental-health outreach program, is outraged but helpless. He confides in Dolly, who, with her local connections and her husband's ruthless skills, is anything but. As the search for the real killer pulls them deeper into the world of hate groups, Dell and Mack together discover the treasonous fog of evil that hovers not only above their town but also above America itself. With this latest installment in his new Aftershock series, Andrew Vachss reminds us once again--in his inimitable, visceral prose-that for some, peace comes at a very high price.

FIRST IN A NEW SERIESDell, an ex-Legionnaire was working as a mercenary when he first saw Dolly, a nurse with M decins Sans Fronti res. When they later married, Dell abandoned his work, and Dolly shed her identity. But not her calling--she became a teacher, confidant, and defender of dozens of teenagers in their Coastal Oregon village. When the star softball pitcher guns down a popular boy on the last day of school, Dolly knows this is no "school shooting." She goes all-in to protect "Mighty Mary" McCoy, even to the extent of unleashing her lethal husband. As Dolly uses her contacts to gain access to medical secrets, Dell returns to his no-boundaries past. Using guile, extortion, shadow networks--and, finally, an act of terrorism--he uncovers the secret MaryLou was willing to sacrifice her own life to protect . . . a soul-killing rite of passage demanded of the town's most vulnerable girls, with her baby sister next on that list.

A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL 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 twenty tight, powerful stories--all from the past decade of his career, including some now published for the first time--along with an original screenplay. Together, they form "Mortal Lock," a searing portrait of the criminal underworld, with both its depravity and humanity on display.

Before Burke, before Cross, Andrew Vachss created Wesley: a ruthless assassin who would stop at nothing to take out his targets. "A BombBuilt in Hell" is Wesley's story, in print for the very first time. While doing extended time for killing a fellow prisoner, Wesley meets Carmine Trentoni in a New York state prison. Carmine's life sentence hasn't cut him off from his outside sources, and he sees great potential in Wesley to carry out his revenge, and carry on his lucrative business. Wesley emerges from prison prepared to be the perfect hitman: calculating, deadly, and driven by money. On his release from prison, Wesley follows Carmine's directions to locate a Mr. Petraglia--the Q to his working-class James Bond. Pet and Wesley set up shop in Brooklyn, and execute their assignments, from a rising Chinatown mobster to a visiting Haitian dignitary, with finesse--and, occasionally, more explosives than are strictly called for. But Wesley isn't satisfied with his low-profile lot, and sets out to make a mark on the city that everyone will notice--which he does, in a shocking, dynamite conclusion.

TO UNIT 3 ChicagoFROM DIRECTORIMPORTANCE: Critical SUBJECT Specimen Retrieval TARGET Shadowy hunter-killer teams, ID'ed viasignature killsworldwide. Identifiable onlyby skull-spine removal from victims. No witnesses, no forensics, no particular race targeted. On rare occasions, scraps of what appear to be playing cardsfound at murder sites. OBJECTIVE Locate and capture any member of such teams. MUST be taken alive for study and observation. AUTHORIZATION APPROVED FOR USE OF OUTSIDE CONTRACTOR Individual ID'ed only as "Cross" and his team.A pure mercenary outfit, well known throughoutcriminal underworld--no inside informants available.Ruthless, undeterred by risk, rumored never to fail, but UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES to be trusted.No known political or social objective, buthas proventreacherous when retained by government in the past. UPDATE Cross and his team claim to haveidentified a patternto the signature-kills, andbelieve theycan predict a forthcoming strike.Theyare prepared to personally confront-and-capture, but financial arrangementalone not sufficient. What you describe as a"Get Out of Jail Free" card is hereby APPROVED."

Andrew Vachss returns with a mesmerizing novel about a hard-core thief who's about to embark on a job that will alter his life forever. Sugar s a pure professional, time tested andpacking 255 pounds of muscle. Accused of a rape he couldn t have done because he was robbing a jewelry store at the time, the DA offers him two options: give up his partners in theheist and walk, orgo back to prison alone. For Sugar, there isn t a choice; he takes the weight. When he gets out, his money is there, but so is another job. One of the heist crew has fallen off the radar, and the mastermind behind the jewelry job asks Sugar to find him and make sure their secretsare safe. Sugar suspects that there s more to this gig than what he is being told. But nothing he suspects can prepare him for what he finds."

From the author of the acclaimed Burke series comes a sharply affecting new novel about a group of outcasts who undertake a "mission" to save a schizophrenic's hidden treasure. When his most beloved student dies as a result of what he believes to be his misguidance, Ho renounces his position as a revered sensei, abandons his dojo and all of his possessions, and embarks on a journey of atonement on the streets of New York City. Here a group of homeless men gather around him: Michael, a gambler who lost it all; Ranger, a psychotic Vietnam veteran; Lamont, an ex-con, poet, and alcoholic in that order; Target, a compulsive "clanger"; and Brewster, the keeper of a secret library in an abandoned inveterate building on the waterfront. When news hits that the building is slated for demolition, the group must subsume each individual's demons into one shared goal: save Brewster's library, at all costs.

After years of carefully working the edges, a blood-commitment forces Burke's return to his former career: "violence-for-money." Claw, once the shot-caller of a white supremacist prison gang is free . . . and terminally ill--he desperately needs a pile of cash to bet on a long-shot cure. He tells Burke about a punk who once purchased protection from him, a man who claims to know the truth behind a "cold case, " the unsolved rape-murder of a thirteen-year-old girl. The killers are all weathly men today, ideal blackmail marks. But wealth is power, and the informant needs Claw's protection again. Burke decides to roll the dice. A win would give Burke the two things he lives for: Money and Revenge. A loss would turn "terminal" from a diagnosis into a certainly, and not just for Claw.

For years Burke has harbored an outlaw's hard love for Wolfe, the beautiful, driven former sex-crimes prosecutor who was fired for refusing to "go along to get along." So when Wolfe is arrested for the attempted murder of John Anson Wychek, a vicious rapist she once prosecuted, Burke deals himself in. That means putting together a distrustful alliance between his underground "family of choice," Wolfe's private network, anda rogue NYPD detective who has his own stake in the outcome. Burke knows that Wolfe s alleged "victim," although convicted only once, is actually a serial rapist. The deeper he presses, the more gaping holes he finds in the prosecution s case, but shadowy law enforcement agencies seem determined to protect Wychek at all costs, no matter who it sacrifices. Burke ups the ante by re-opening all the old "cold case rape investigations, calls in a lot of markers from both sides of the law, and finally shows all the players why "down here" is no place for tourists."

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.In Choice of Evil, Burke is forced to confront his most harrowing mystery: the mind of an obsessive serial killer. And soon the emotionally void method behind the killer's madness becomes terrifyingly familiar, reminding Burke of his childhood partner, Wesley, the ice-man assassin who never missed, even when the target was himself. Has Wesley come back from the dead? The whisper-stream says so. And the truth may just challenge Burke's very sense of reality. Expertly plotted, addictive, enthralling, Choice of Evil is Andrew Vachss' most haunting tale to date. "A gripping tale of evil, cruelty, retribution and love." -The Plain Dealer"Choice of Evil is Vachss' darkest Burke yet, exploring man's propensity for savagery, ice-cold cunning and wearing thin the limits of sanity." -The Clarion-Ledger (Mississippi)

"Vachss is a contemporary master."--The Atlanta Journal-Constitution"Vachss' writing is like a dark roller coaster ride of fear, love and hate." --The Times- PicayuneA hit man defies the confines of a life sentence to avenge his sister's batterer. An immaculately dressed man hires a street gang to extract his daughter from a Central American prison, for reasons as mysterious as they are deadly. A two-bit graffiti artist with a taste for Nazi-ganda finds himself face-to-face with three punks out to make a mark of their own--literally--with a tattoo needle. From neo-noir master Andrew Vachss comes Everybody Pays, 38 white-knuckle rides into a netherworld of pederasts and prostitutes, stick-up kids and fall guys--where private codes of crime and punishment pulsate beneath a surface system of law and order, and our moral compass spins frighteningly out of control. Here is the street-grit prose that has earned Vachss comparisons to Chandler, Cain, and Hammett--and the ingenious plot twists that transform the double-cross into an expression of retribution, the dark deed into a thing of beauty. Electrifying and enigmatic, Everybody Pays is a sojourn into the nature of evil itself--a trip made all the more frightening by its proximity to our front doorstep. "Vachss [is] in the first rank of contemporary American crime writers."--The Kansas City Star"Andrew Vachss has become a cult favorite, and for good reason." --Cosmopolitan

In Burke, Vachss gave readers of crime fiction a hero they could believe in, an avenger whose sense of justice was forged behind bars and tempered on New York's meanest streets. In this blistering new thriller, Burke is drawn into his ugliest case yet, one that involves an underground network of abused women and the sleekly ingenious stalkers who've marked them as their personal victims. Burke's client is Crystal Beth, a beautiful outlaw with a tattoo on her face and a mission burned into her heart. She is trying to shield one of her charges from a vengeful ex with fetishes for Nazism and torture. But the stalker has a protector, someone so informed, so ruthless, and so connected that he need only make a few phone calls to shut down Crystal Beth's operation for good--and Burke along with it. Sinuous in its complexities, brutal in its momentum, Safe House is Burke at the edge of his nerve and cunning. And it's Vachss at the peak of his form.