Andrew Vachss Books In Order

Burke Books In Order

  1. Flood (1985)
  2. Strega (1987)
  3. Blue Belle (1988)
  4. Hard Candy (1989)
  5. Blossom (1990)
  6. Sacrifice (1991)
  7. Down in the Zero (1994)
  8. Footsteps of the Hawk (1995)
  9. False Allegations (1996)
  10. Safe House (1998)
  11. Choice of Evil (1999)
  12. Dead and Gone (2000)
  13. Pain Management (2001)
  14. Only Child (2002)
  15. Down Here (2004)
  16. Mask Market (2006)
  17. Terminal (2007)
  18. Another Life (2008)

Hap and Leonard Collections Books In Order

  1. Veil’s Visit (1999)

Cross Books In Order

  1. Blackjack (2012)
  2. Urban Renewal (2014)
  3. Drawing Dead (2016)

Aftershock Books In Order

  1. Aftershock (2013)
  2. Shockwave (2014)
  3. Signwave (2015)

Novels

  1. Shella (1993)
  2. The Getaway Man (2003)
  3. Two Trains Running (2005)
  4. Haiku (2009)
  5. Heart Transplant (2010)
  6. The Weight (2010)
  7. That’s How I Roll (2012)
  8. Carbon (2019)
  9. Blood Line (2022)

Collections

  1. Born Bad (1986)
  2. Another Chance to Get It Right (1993)
  3. Everybody Pays (1999)
  4. Proving It (2001)
  5. Hard Looks (2003)
  6. Harder Looks (2012)
  7. Mortal Lock (2013)

Graphic Novels

  1. Underground (2014)

Novellas

  1. A Bomb Built in Hell (2010)
  2. The Questioner (2018)

Anthologies edited

  1. Dark Horse Presents Fifth Anniversary Special (1991)

Burke Book Covers

Hap and Leonard Collections Book Covers

Cross Book Covers

Aftershock Book Covers

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Graphic Novels Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Andrew Vachss Books Overview

Flood

Burke’s newest client is a woman named Flood, who has the face of an angel, the body of a high priced stripper, and the skills of a professional executioner. She wants Burke to find a monster for her so she can kill him with her bare hands. In this cauterizing thriller, Andrew Vachss s renegade private eye teams up with a lethally gifted avenger to follow a child s murderer through the catacombs of New York, where every alley is blind and the penthouses are as dangerous as the baseme*nts. Fearfully knowing, crackling with narrative tension, and written in prose as forceful as a hollow point slug, Flood is Burke at his deadliest and Vachss at the peak of his form. An extraordinary thriller…
. Vachss never flinches from the horror. Washington Post Book World Burke would eat Spade and Marlowe for breakfast, not even spitting out the bones. He is one tough, mean, pray God you don t meet him hombre. Boston Herald

Strega

Andrew Vachss’s implacable private eye has a new client, Strega. She wants Burke to find an obscene photograph and that search will take him into the ocean that flows just beneath the city, an ocean whose currents are flesh and money, the anguish of children and the pleasure of twisted adults. It is a place that Burke can visit only at the risk of his sanity and his life. But between the power of Strega and his own sense of justice, there is no turning back. In Strega one of our most acclaimed crime writers gives us a thriller that might have been imagined by Dante. For this is a tour of hell with no stops left out, conducted by a novelist who writes with the authority of the damned. It s wonderful. The words leap off the page. The plot is fresh. The principal character is original. The style is as clean as a haiku. The Washington Post Book World

Blue Belle

Burke is one of the most cold-blooded yet strangely honorable heroes in the history of crime fiction, an outlaw who makes his living by preying on the most vicious of New York City’s bottom-feeders, those who thrive on the suffering of children. In Andrew Vachss’s tautly engrossing novel Burke is given a purse full of dirty money to fnd the infamous Ghost Van that is cutting a lethal swath among the teenage prostitutes in the hood. He also gets help in the form of a stripper named Belle, whose moves on the runway are outclassed only by what she can do in a getaway car. But not even Burke is prepared for the evil that is behind the Ghost Van or for the sheer menace of its guardian, a cadaverous karate expert who enjoys killing so much that he has named himself after death. ‘A book so ferocious, with characters so venal and actions so breakneck, that you dare not get in the way…
. First rate.’ – Chicago Tribune

Hard Candy

In this mercilessly compelling thriller, Burke – the private eye, sting artist, and occasional hit man who metes out a cruelly ingenious vengeance on those who victimize children – is up against a soft-spoken messiah who may be rescuing runaways or recruiting them for his own hideous purposes. But in doing so Burke becomes a target for an entire Mafia family, a who*re with a heart of cyanide, and a contract killer as implacable as a heat-seeking missile. Written with Vachss’ signature narrative overdrive – and with his unnerving familiarity with the sub-baseme*nt of American crime – Hard Candy is vintage Burke. ‘Burke fills a void…
. With his soiled white hat, this Lone Ranger…
asks difficult questions while shining light into the darkest recesses.’ – Chicago Tribune ‘There’s no way to put a Vachss book down once you’ve begun…
. The plot hooks are engaging and the one-liners pierce like bullets.’ – Detroit Free Press

Blossom

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. In Blossom, an old cellmate has summoned Burke to a fading Indiana mill town, where a young boy is charged with a crime he didn’t commit and a twisted serial sniper has turned a local lover’s lane into a killing field. And it’s here that Burke meets Blossom, the brilliant, beautiful young woman who has her own reasons for finding the murderer and her own idea of vengeance. Dense with atmosphere, savagely convincing, this is Vachss at his uncompromising best.

Sacrifice

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. Gripping and chillingly knowledgeable about the mechanisms of evil, Sacrifice is a thriller of savage authority from one of the best crime writers of our generation. ‘Vachss is a contemporary master…
. Decidedly hard-boiled, his prose is as lean, tough-edged and brittle as the man who is his protagonist.’ – The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ‘A harrowing tale in which outcasts are the moral heroes, and the people who belong to civilization are corrupt…
. An absolute original…
. Andrew Vachss has become a cult favorite, and for good reason.’ – Cosmopolitan

Down in the Zero

Andrew Vachss has reinvented detective fiction for an age in which guilty secrets are obsolete and murder isn’t even worth a news headline. And in the person of his haunted, hell-ridden private eye Burke, Vachss has given us a new kind of hero: a man inured to every evil except the kind that preys on children. Now Burke is back, investigating an epidemic of apparent suicides among the teenagers of a wealthy Connecticut suburb. There he discovers a sinister connection between the anguish of the young and the activities of an elite sadomaso*chistic underground, for whom pain and its accompanying rituals are a source of pleasure and power. ‘Vachss’s short sharp sentences crackle with energy; his plots are satisfyingly elaborate; the narratives are beautifully paced, and the characters…
are always pungently individual.’ – Chicago Sun-Times ‘The characters and events are as sharply defined as if they were etched in steel. The prose is short and choppy, like the ticking of a time bomb about to explode.’ – Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Footsteps of the Hawk

Andrew Vachss has reinvented detective fiction for an age in which guilty secrets are obsolete and murder isn’t even worth a news headline. And in the person of his haunted, hell-ridden private eye Burke, Vachss has given us a new kind of hero: a man inured to every evil except the kind that preys on children. Now Burke is back, investigating an epidemic of apparent suicides among the teenagers of a wealthy Connecticut suburb. There he discovers a sinister connection between the anguish of the young and the activities of an elite sadomaso*chistic underground, for whom pain and its accompanying rituals are a source of pleasure and power. ‘Vachss’s short sharp sentences crackle with energy; his plots are satisfyingly elaborate; the narratives are beautifully paced, and the characters…
are always pungently individual.’ – Chicago Sun-Times ‘The characters and events are as sharply defined as if they were etched in steel. The prose is short and choppy, like the ticking of a time bomb about to explode.’ – Seattle Post-Intelligencer

False Allegations

‘In the first rank of American crime writers…
. Next to Vachss, Chandler, Cain and Hammett look like choirboys.’
Cleveland Plain Dealer

Burke ex con, mercenary, sometime killer makes his living preying on New York’s most vicious predators and 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. Kite has a case that may be the real thing, but needs Burke to tell him if it is. And if mere money can’t persuade Burke to cooperate, Kite has plenty of other incentives at his disposal including a fanatical bodyguard with a taste for corsets and brass knuckles. A tour guide to hell written in icy prose, False Allegations is Vachss at his most unnerving.

‘Burke is the toughest talking first person narrator since Mike Hammer.’
Los Angeles Times

‘Vachss…
writes hypnotically violent prose.’
Chicago Sun Times

Safe House

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 Na*zism 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.

Choice of Evil

A rally in Central Park, a protest against gaybashing. A murderous drive by. Five people down, two dead. One of them Crystal Beth, girlfriend of Burke, the most haunted and darkly talented man for hire in the city. First the gay bashers celebrate…
then they start dropping. Claiming responsibility is the mysterious ‘Ho*mo Erectus,’ whose identity is as unknown as his mission is clear. Burke is unsurprised when the cops pull him in for questioning ‘I was born a suspect.’ But he is now also homeless and homicidal, a gun without a target, unable to find the shooters who killed his last chance at love, and drifting near the brink of the ultimate despair he calls the Zero. Most citizens see Ho*mo Erectus as a serial killer with a political agenda. But to some, he’s become a hero. Like the police, they desperately want to find him. But unlike the police, they want to help him disappear before the dragnet tightens. They hire Burke for the job. Which is when things really get ugly. For as Burke tracks the killer, he stumbles across the unmistakable footprints of the man who was the city’s most feared assassin before his own death an ice cold murder machine whose very name still inspires terror in the city’s underground. The whisper stream is divided in its verdict: either Wesley never really died…
or he’s found a way to come back. In Choice of Evil, Burke strays closer to the edge than he ever has before, and closer to the most twisted workings of the human heart and mind. It is also Andrew Vachss’s most haunting and frightening novel to date.

Dead and Gone

It’s not an unusual job for Burke ex con, career criminal, and ultimate urban man for hire to act as middleman in an exchange of cash for a kidnapped child. But this time the only things exchanged are bullets. Burke loses his beloved partner, and lies in a hospital bed close to or maybe even past death, hovering in a netherworld of nightmares and hallucinations. When he finally escapes from the hospital, his appearance has changed radically and so has he. Burke’s religion is revenge, and he is eager to begin worship. Without the slightest clue as to who ordered the hit, he goes back to his original contact. When that meeting ends in homicide, Burke goes even deeper underground than ever before. He vanishes off every radar screen, and starts his hunt. In order to connect the dots, Burke enlists the aid of a pilot he worked with during the war in Biafra, a Russian speaking Cambodian woman named Gem, and a mystical childhood friend the police would call him a ‘co defendant’ who finds patterns where others see chaos. Burke’s search starts in Chicago and ends in the Pacific Northwest a foreign country to the New York City bred orphan. When a pattern finally emerges, Burke discovers truly foreign territory a place where pedophiles, neo Na*zis, abortion clinic bombers, and kiddie po*rn manufacturers expect immunity from prosecution, a safe harbor for predatory degenerates. And when he learns who is running the show, Burke must call upon a lifetime of training in the dark arts to do what he does best: survive. Stunning in its execution, shocking in its conclusion, Dead and Gone gives us a new Burke, trapped out of his element and more dangerous than ever.

Pain Management

Andrew Vachss’s previous novel, Dead and Gone, prompted the Rocky Mountain News to say, Starting a Vachss novel is like putting a vial of nitroglycerine into your pocket and going for a jog. With his latest thriller, Vachss turns the heat up a notch by dropping his career criminal and ultimate urban survivalist, Burke, in the middle of some of the most dangerously determined humans he has ever faced. Burke has gone missing and presumed from his native New York City, following a failed assassination attempt. The shadowy man for hire is scratching out an existence in the Pacific Northwest, waiting to see if it is safe to return. Without his underground network of contacts and connections, cut off from his own people, Burke is forced to abandon his trademark complex scams. Instead, he returns to what he refers to as violence for money. When Gem, the professional border crosser who calls herself his wife, brings him a job tracking down a runaway teenager, Burke finds himself in a long, dark tunnel of lies lined with more games than players. Burke takes to the unfamiliar streets, quickly and brutally establishing a presence. The whisper stream carries him to a fanatical group of criminal Samaritans dedicated to supplying adequate drugs for those suffering from chronic pain. Forced into a potentially deadly alliance, Burke walks the wire between betrayals, risking it all for a girl he has never met. Because the State raised outlaw knows better than most that there are many kinds of pain. And many ways to manage it.

Only Child

After years on the run, Burke is desperate to return to his native New York, the only way he can reconnect with his outlaw family. But to survive in their part of the City, where reputation is everything, Burke must take major risks to reestablish his presence. So when a Mafia man contacts him about the murder as message of his sixteen year old daughter the offspring of what he calls an outside the tribe affair that he must keep secret at all costs Burke’s depleted bankroll persuades him to step out of the shadows and do something he hasn t done in years…
actually investigate a crime. Burke needs cover to penetrate the teenage subculture of the Long Island town where the girl lived and died, so he puts together a crew of gifted role players, including a pair of lesbian power exchangers who market their special brand of sex on the Internet. When Burke himself surfaces as a casting director, seeking tomorrow s stars for a movie to be shot on location, the investigation quickly spins off into uncharted depths. What he discovers is a new kind of filmmaking, a new kind of violence, and a predator unlike any he s ever known. When they meet head on over a brutal work of cin ma v rit , only one of them will survive the final cut.

Down Here

Bone crushing impact, set in a milieu that clogs your lungs and stings your eyes, Down Here is the penetrating and remarkable new thriller from the master of American noir. For many years, Burke has carried a torch for Wolfe, the beautiful, driven former sex crimes prosecutor who was fired for refusing to ‘go along to get along.’ They share a marrow deep hatred of predators but walk different sides of the street when it comes to justice. So when Burke hears that Wolfe has been arrested for attempted murder, he knows something is double wrong and deals himself in. Putting together a distrustful alliance between his family of choice, Wolfe’s outlaw network, and an informant inside the police department, Burke starts with the alleged victim, a brutal serial rapist Wolfe had personally prosecuted. He’s back on the street because his conviction was reversed, and any of his long list of victims has plenty of motive to kill him. The deeper Burke gets into the investigation, the more holes he finds in the case against Wolfe. Yet the DA’s office continues to press forward, and Burke has to find out what their game is. No stranger to devil’s bargains, Burke reopens the rape investigations his way and discovers an artist whose violent work in progress is a whole city’s nightmare.

Mask Market

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 Hardcover edition.

Terminal

You know why we hate you? Not because you don t know what we know, but because, if you did, you wouldn t give a damn. So I m sitting here, waiting to commit extortion, and planning a lot worse. I m what you d call a criminal. That’s why I ll never be you. And I m proud of it. from TerminalWhen 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. The only card he has to play is a small time degenerate who paid for protection when they were in prison together. That professional bottom feeder claims he personally buried the body of a thirteen year old girl who had been raped, tortured, and finally killed by three rich men more than thirty years ago and that he s holding irrefutable proof. But such a complicated extortion scheme needs the hand of a specialist crew, so Burke is offered a piece of the action. He and his outlaw family put together a lethal plan. If they can pull it off, Burke gets the two things he lives for: Money and Revenge. If not, Terminal could prove to be more than just one man s diagnosis. Terminal is a blistering thriller that forces Burke back in time to keep a blood commitment to a brother from his prison past, and to avenge the cold cased rape murder of a teenage girl.

Another Life

The only person Burke has ever called father, a legendary crime planner known throughout the underground as the Prof, is in a coma, barely clinging to life in the off the books hospital where the crew stashed him after their last job went off the rails. So when Pryce, a shadow man with deep and very dark government connections, offers a package Presidential grade medical services for the Prof and a wiped clean slate for everyone who participates Burke signs the contract without reading it. The two year old son of a Saudi prince has been kidnapped. A highly professional snatch: no errors, no forensics…
and no ransom note. Burke’s job: get the kid back. Whatever it costs, whatever it takes. Pryce came to Burke because the profile concluded this was the work of a pedophile ring. But after Burke turns over every rock and comes up empty in his hunt for maggots, the ultimate man for hire must return to the day Baby Boy Burke was written on his birth certificate to conduct the one interrogation that could possibly save this child and write, in the blood of his enemies, the final act of his life story.

Shella

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.

The Getaway Man

Eddie starts stealing cars long before he’s old enough to get a license, driven by a force so compelling that he never questions, just obeys. After a series of false starts, interrupted by stays in juvenile institutions and a state prison term, Eddie’s skills and loyalty attract the attention of J.C., a near legendary hijacker. When he gets out, Eddie becomes the driver for J.C.’s ultra professional crew. J.C., the master planner, is finally ready to pull off that one huge job every con dreams of…
the Retirement Score. But some roads have twists even a professional getaway man couldn’t foresee…
Andrew Vachss, a writer widely acclaimed for breathing new life and death into the crime genre, here presents a classic noir tale, relentlessly displaying and dissecting not guilt, but innocence.

Two Trains Running

In his most original and compelling book yet, Andrew Vachss presents an electrifying tale of corruption in a devastated mill town. It is 1959 a moment in history when the clandestine, powerful forces that will shape America to the present day are about to collide. Walker Dett is a hired gun, known for using the most extreme measures to accomplish his missions. Royal Beaumont is the ‘hillbilly boss’ who turned Locke City from a dying town into a thriving vice capital. But organized crime outsiders are moving in on Beaumont’s turf, so he reaches out for Dett in a high risk move to maintain his power at all costs. Add a rival Irish political machine, a deeply entrenched neo Na*zi ‘party’, the nascent black power movement, turf disputing juvenile gangs, a muck raking journalist who doubles as a blackmailer, the FBI a covert observer and occasional participant which may itself be under surveillance and Locke City is about as stable as a nitroglycerin truck stalled on the railroad tracks.

Haiku

From the author of the acclaimed Burke series: a searing new novel that follows a band of homeless outcasts on a journey to recover what each has lost. 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 a master, and now roams the streets in search of a way to atone. Drawn by his presence, a group forms around him: Michael, an addicted gambler who has lost everything, including himself; Ranger, a Vietnam veteran with a tenuous grip on reality; Lamont, a once fearless street gang warlord turned hopeless alcoholic; Target, a relentless ‘clanger’ who speaks only by echoing the sounds of others; and Brewster, an obsessive collector of hardboiled paperbacks he stashes in an abandoned building even vermin avoid. Late one night, Michael spots a woman in a white Rolls Royce throwing something into the river. Convinced that the woman is a perfect blackmail target, he attempts to recruit the others to search for her. But news that Brewster’s library is slated for demolition turns this halfhearted effort into a serious mission to find the ultimate problem solver: money, and with it a new home for Brewster’s precious collection. Each frantic knock opens another barred door as the building’s destruction draws nearer. And the answers to each man’s questions trigger shocking explosions that hit you with all the visceral power we have come to expect from this fierce and dynamic writer.

Heart Transplant

School bullying is universally decried, bemoaned, and condemned. And on the rise. Whether it’s a teenager committing suicide as a result of a Facebook posting or a group of schoolchildren taunting another child with autism and filming it for the ‘entertainment’ of others, the longest lasting, deepest scarring impact of bullying is emotional, not physical. Failure to understand this has handicapped an already insipid series of failed ‘solutions.’ Heart Transplant is aimed at actually changing the way we deal with perhaps the most critical issue for children and parents alike today. To accomplish this mission, an entirely new genre was created. Neither a graphic novel nor a self help book, it uses elements of both to reach parents and children alike. The intermingling of word and art is achieved so smoothly that it is experienced as one does words and music: you may forget the lyrics and hum the tune, but that very act evokes the lyrics. And if it’s the lyrics that stick with you, you’ll find yourself humming the tune. The anchoring essay by clinical social worker Zak Mucha explains in prose detail what the reader has just experienced. This book will be shelved under ‘Parenting’ and ‘Young Adult.’ Why? Because there is no ‘Bullying’ section in any bookstore. And if Heart Transplant hits either target, it will hit both. Nothing like this has ever been tried before. But if it works, the high risk will be rewarded by the greatest prize of all.

The Weight

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 is that rarest of commodities: an old-school professional thief, tough and loyal as a pit bull, packing 255 pounds of muscle. When he’s picked out of a photo array in a vicious rape case, the cops find his apartment empty. A stakeout catches Sugar when he returns…
carrying a loaded pistol. The sex-crime cops get nothing from their interrogation, but a streetwise detective figures out why Sugar offers no alibi: at the time of the rape, a holiday-weekend break-in job was being pulled at a jewelry store. The DA offers Sugar two options: give up his partners in the jewelry heist and walk, or plead to the rape he didn’t commit-and he’ll toss in the gun charge. For Sugar, that’s not two options; he takes The Weight.

When Sugar finishes his time, his money is waiting for him, held by Solly, the mastermind behind the jewelry heist. But Solly tells Sugar that one of the heist crew was actually sent by another planner-and that planner has just died. In Sugar’s world, all loose threads must be cut. He suspects that there’s more to this job than what Solly is telling him. But nothing he suspects or imagines can prepare him for what he finds…

That’s How I Roll

Around here, even dying can be hard. Horribly hard. Only death itself comes easy. By easy, I mean frequent. Death happens so often that people regard it pretty much the same as the never ending rain. When life itself is hard, you have to be hard to live. Even a bit*ch will cull one of her own pups if she doesn’t think he’s going to be tough enough she knows she’s only got but so much milk, and there’s none to waste. Survival isn’t some skill we learned it’s in all our genes. Nobody needed to be told to step aside when they saw the Beast coming. But not everyone stepped fast enough. There’s rock slides. Floods, too. Those are natural phenomena. You live here, you expect them. But just because a man’s found under tons of rock, or floating in the river, doesn’t mean his death was due to natural causes. Folks drink a lot. Wives get beaten something fierce. Some of those wives can shoot pretty good. And some of their husbands never think it can happen to them, even when they’re sleeping off a drunk. There’s supposed to be good and bad in everyone. Probably is. But here, it’s the bad in you that’s more often the most useful. Like the difference between climate and weather. Most folks around here don’t view a killing as good or bad just something that happens, like a flood or a fire. That’s why a whole lot of bodies never get viewed at all. For a man like me, this is a good part of the country to do my work. I take pride in the quality of my work, but I never deceive myself that every death at my hands is justified, never mind righteous or noble. I never saw myself as…
much of anything, really. Just a crippled, cornered rat, trying to protect my little brother with whatever I can.

Born Bad

From a writer whose novels have been acclaimed for their unflinching exploration of evil comes a brilliant collection of short stories some never before published that distill dread back down to its essence and inject it straight into the reader’s back brain. Andrew Vachss might have scissored his characters from today’s headlines: a stalker prowling around an anonymous high rise; a serial killer whose transgressions reflect a childhood of hideous abuse; an inner city gunman who is willing to take out a blockful of victims in order to win a moment of acceptance. Tautly written and endowed with murderous ironic spin, Born Bad plunges us into the hell that lies just outside our bedroom windows.

Another Chance to Get It Right

When Another Chance to Get It Right debuted on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1993, Dark Horse was deluged with phone calls as people clamored to buy the book. Now, nearly a decade later, Dark Horse is proud to offer an updated edition of the acclaimed collection of short stories, poetry, and allegory. This new edition boasts an all new, never before published Vachss penned prose story called ‘La Coraz n del Ni os,’ along with illustrations and a magnificent new cover by Geof Darrow The Matrix I, The Matrix Reloaded, and The Matrix Revolutions. The beautiful drawings add a different dimension to this celebration of the potential of parenting, a dimension that’s rarely seen in the genre, making it as much inspirational as it is instructional.

Everybody Pays

A 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 Na*zi 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.

Hard Looks

Andrew Vachss’ writing has been described as ‘red hot and serious as a punctured lung’ Playboy, ‘hypnotically violent…
made up of equal part broken concrete block and razor wire’ Chicago Sun Times, and ‘short and choppy, like the ticking of a time bomb’ Seattle Post Intelligencer. This brand new book contains fifteen of Vachss’ most compelling, life at ground zero stories, brought to life by an outstanding line up of comics’ most talented writers and artists. This exciting book also contains ‘Half Breed,’ a never before published story by Vachss, with illustrations and a new cover by Geofrey Darrow, conceptual designer for the motion pictures The Matrix I, The Matrix Reloaded, and The Matrix Revolutions.

Dark Horse Presents Fifth Anniversary Special

Contents: Give Me Liberty; Concrete: Objects of Value; Aliens; The American; Roachmill; Placebo; Black Cross; The Aerialist, Part 3; Heartbreakers, Prologue; Aliens vs. Predator; Sin City, Part 1

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