Andrew Vachss – författare

Andrew Vachss, the master of hard-boiled fiction, returns with a deeply revealing new novel about an assassin whose love forced him to kill his own conscience.Esau Till’s race is almost run. After pleading guilty to a series of homicides, he sits on death row, awaiting lethal injection. And writing his life story. But his memoir is no case study in tragedy—it’s his one last chance to protect his brother, Tory, after he’s gone. And, as too many have learned, when it comes to protecting his baby brother, Esau Till is a man without boundaries. Esau’s father was a widely feared beast who, it was commonly believed, killed his wife and used his own daughter as a substitute. In Esau’s own words, when your sister is your mother, too, you know you’re not going to come out right. Not you, not your life, not nothing.When the genetic cards were dealt, Esau drew a genius IQ but a horribly crippled body. His brother Tory drew a “slow” mind but almost superhuman strength. Very early on, Esau learned that the only way to guarantee his baby brother’s safety was to make himself indispensable to certain people. A self-taught explosives expert, he became the top assassin for two rival local mobs. When a third mob attempted to recruit his brother, Esau took them all out, unaware that one of them was an under-cover FBI agent. Execution looms, but no prison can hold Esau’s mind. Or his love. As the State prepares to take his life, Esau plots going all-in on the last and most deadly hand he will ever play.

The idyllic facade of a small coastal tourist magnet hides its secrets well. But when the shining star pitcher of the girls’ softball team guns down the most popular boy in school, the shockwaves reverberate far beyond the school’s walls. In the wake of the killing, two of the town’s newer residents turn over deeply embedded rocks, exposing a subculture of almost unimaginable horror lurking beneath. Formerly a nurse with Médecins Sans Frontières, Dolly has become a defender and confidante to dozens of local teenage girls, and she refuses to accept that MaryLou (“Mighty Mary”) McCoy’s gunning down Cameron Taft in a high school hallway is a typical school shooting. Although MaryLou’s guilt is not in doubt—it’s even captured on the school’s security camera—the girl insists on a trial . . . but inexplicably refuses to cooperate with her own defense. Enlisting her troupe of teenagers and the local contacts she has cemented, Dolly calls on all of her resources to get to the truth . . . and to whatever secret MaryLou is guarding. When Dolly’s husband, Dell, sees his beloved wife begin her quest, he immediately signs on. A former mercenary and ex-Legionnaire, Dell treats this “job” as he would any other—with no boundaries. His entire arsenal is put into play: guile, extortion, tracking devices, shadow networks, and, finally, an act of terrorism that blows the cover off the soul-killing rite of passage demanded of the town’s most vulnerable girls. Dell’s discovery of MaryLou’s true motive and the community’s shocking failure to protect its children culminates in a decision to put the town itself on trial. The explosive verdict blows away the facade . . . and forces the village to stand in judgment of itself. The aftershocks keep coming until the foundation itself fractures, leaving cracks too deep to patch ever again.

Dell, a former mercenary, and his wife, Dolly, a former battlefield nurse, believe they have finally found a place of peace in a deceptively idyllic small town on the Oregon coast. But early one morning, just before daybreak, a body washes up on the town’s pristine beach. The dead man’s shaven skull has been torn open, and his upper body is covered with neo-Nazi tattoos. The police quickly pick up Homer, a “walking wounded” schizophrenic who has been showing off a wristwatch he says God just gave him—a watch engraved with a symbol that exactly matches one of the dead man’s tattoos. Regardless of the fact that Homer could never have inflicted such damage on a man twice his weight and half his age, he is immediately arrested because the D.A. is desperate to close the case before it negatively affects tourism—the town’s only industry. Mack, the director and sole employee of the local mental-health outreach program, is outraged but helpless. He confides in Dolly, who shares his outrage. But with her local connections and her husband’s ruthless skills, Dolly is anything but helpless. As the search for the real killer pulls them deeper into the world of hate groups, Dell is forced to share some of his “dark arts” knowledge with Mack. Together they 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.

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 investigator 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 basements.  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.

            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 find 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.

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.    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 lovers'' 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.

   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 teenagers of a wealthy Connecticut suburb.  There he discovers a sinister connection between the anguish of the young and the activities of an elite sadomasochistic underground, for whom pan and its accompanying rituals are a source of pleasure—and power