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.

From the modern master of noir, Andrew Vachss, comes this heart-topping and bestselling new thriller that completely reinvents the Burke series. Urban Outlaw Burke barely survives an attack by a professional hit squad that kills his partner. With a new face, Burke goes into hiding. And on the hunt. Dead and Gone takes him from the streets of New York City through a cross-country underground, and deep into his own tortured past. The violent journey ends in a place that exists only in the dreams of the darkest degenerates on earth.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Andrew Vachss stabs his trademark hard-boiled style into the heart of a quaint little seacoast village . . . one seething with corruption beneath its idyllic facade.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 Médecins Sans Frontières nursing career and moved smoothly into civilian life, Dell had been a mercenary originally trained by the French Foreign Legion, so they both have to sacrifice their prior identities. Dolly becomes a part-time foster mother to dozens of teenagers, while Dell has no interest in the town or its people. But when the shining star of the girls' softball team shoots and kills the most popular boy in school, Dolly asks Dell to uncover the true motive behind this inexplicable crime. Dell treats the job as he would any other mission--no boundaries. So it doesn't take him long to uncover a horrifying rite of passage demanded of...

The new novel from Andrew Vachss puts Burke 'hard-core career criminal and man-for-hire' up against a new breed of predator: stalkers. Some obsessed, some deranged, all dangerous.Burke's old prison pal Hercules, hired by a shadowy network that runs a safehouse for stalking victims, botched the job, and one of the stalkers is dead. To save his partner, Burke has to penetrate the network, and he makes a deal with the boss, Crystal Beth, a woman as obsessed as the stalkers. But Crystal Beth has a stalker of her own, an extortionist who threatens to bring down her entire network unless she surrenders one of the women she's hiding.When Burke learns that the extortionist might be government-issue, and that the stalker he's protecting is a member of a neo-Nazi cell with plans to make Oklahoma City look like a pipe bomb, his survivalist instincts go on full alert ("When there's too many loose threads, somebody always weaves them into a noose"). And when it comes down to making his own house and his family-of-choice safe, Burke turns lethal.With blistering power, Safe House reminds us why Kirkus has called Burke "one of the most fascinating male characters in crime fiction."

From the author of the best-selling Burke novels, the sequel to Aftershock: the second installment of his thrilling new series in which Dell, an ex-mercenary, and Dolly, a former battlefield nurse, lead us deep into the ugly underbelly of a seemingly idyllic Pacific Northwest coastal town.Just before daybreak, a body washes up on a pristine beach. The dead man's skull has been bashed open, and his upper body is covered in neo-Nazi tattoos. An anonymous photographer e-mails an image of the scene to the local news, spurring the police to instantaneous response. Searching for suspects at one of the town's "homeless-by-choice" encampments, the cops pick up Homer, a "walking wounded" schizophrenic, who has been showing off a wristwatch he says God gave him. The watch is engraved with a symbol that exactly matches one of the dead man's tattoos. Even though Homer could never have inflicted such damage on a man twice his weight and half his age, he is immediately...

A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINALA 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.Review"A collection of white-hot short stories." --Kirkus Reviews“Vachss’s reverence for storytelling is evident in the blunt beauty of his language.” —Chicago Sun-Times“Vachss is a contemporary master. . . Decidedly hard-boiled, his prose is lean, tough-edged, and brittle.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution“To read Andrews Vachss at his best is to take a ride on the dark side, where the plight of the oppressed and vulnerable . . . becomes the catalyst for revenge-fueled street justice.” —Los  Angeles Times“Many writers try to cover the same ground as Vachss. A handful are as good. None are better.” —People“Vachss’s stories . . . burn with righteous rage and transfer a degree of that rage to the reader.” —The Washington Post Book World“Writing in a style so sleekly engineered that it purrs when you pop the hood, Vachss gives us such a smooth ride that it’s easy to forget someone is driving this thing.” —The New York Times Book Review “Vachss is red-hot and as serious as a punctured lung.” —PlayboyAbout the AuthorAndrew 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.READER BIOPhil Gigante has narrated over 70 audiobooks, including Audie Award winner The Dark Highlander. An actor, director, and producer with over 20 years' experience in theatre, film, television, and radio, he is currently the artistic director of Gigantic Productions and Little Giant Children's Theatre. He makes his home in the Midwest.

Once a mercenary, later an assassin, and now living a different life, Dell has bone-marrow-deep loyalty and protective instincts that know no bounds when it comes to his wife, Dolly, a former battle-field nurse, and their close-knit group of Dolly's friends and Dell's allies. When Dolly receives a thinly veiled threat, Dell reverts to his old ways to untangle the background of a prominent local figure, George Byron Benton, whose actions have awakened Dell's obsessive need for security. This target combines the deadly patience of a gila monster and a complex agenda--including a public life that's all elaborate disguise. To penetrate Benton's dense facade, Dell methodically works his way through the only reliable source of news in the area--a blog called Undercurrents. If he manages to track Benton down, Dell will have to decide how far he is willing to go to recapture the sense of safety that Benton has stolen. With Andrew Vachss's trademark razor-sharp dialogue...

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.

Chicago--the reigning #1 city in homicides--has no shortage of deadly gangs. And all those gangs know well that the Cross crew occupies a cinderblock bunker called Red 71 . . . the last place you want to go, unless you're willing to risk it being the last place you go. The crew is notorious for its deadly efficiency and its disinterest in anything but money. So why has it turned from seller to buyer, grabbing up houses on a decaying block where only a few holdouts remain? Both the cops and the underworld are watching closely . . . but are they the only ones?