A routine sixth outing for Vachss's dark knight Burke—that is, a bitter cup overflowing with satanic child-rape, multiple personality disorder, voodoo, execution-murders, and other workaday hazards of the ``outlaw'' p.i.'s ever-more bleak—and vengeful—Gotham half-life. Back from a series-freshening trip to Indiana (Blossom, 1990), Burke again surrounds himself with series regulars (martial-arts master Max the Silent, electronic wizard Mole, etc.) who play Robin to his Batman as he again takes on child abusers—attorney Vachss's legal foes in real life. What is missing is the sort of strong heroine (Flood, Blue Belle, etc.) who in the past has grounded Burke's high-voltage vigilantism; here, Burke's main female companionship is provided by a prostitute—representative of the sort of nasty turns that dominate the novel, which opens with Burke posing as a blind man to nail a ``freak''—a child abuser. Soon, bigger prey beckons: a child-porn ring with satanic trappings whose grim abuse has made a multiple personality of one eight-year-old Luke, with one of the personalities a stone killer. A crusading D.A. wants to try Luke for murder, but Burke persuades her to go after the cult—a decision that, coupled with his work on another case, sweeps him into a netherworld inhabited by, among others, a wealthy pedophile, a demented counterfeiter, a slick gun-runner, and an alluring voodoo queen. The brutal action is slightly sweetened by Burke's tutelage of a young, personable gangster, and significantly soured by his self-pitying running commentary (``I live under the darkness, where it's safe. Safe from things so secret that they have no name'')—and explodes in a merciless mass-killing by Burke of the cult, blood-revenge for his own sufferings as a child. Vachss still writes a mean page, full of sound and fury; but his spike-hard prose and action are blunted by a moralism that smugly sets Burke up as the most obnoxiously self-righteous—and increasingly one-note—judge, jury, and executioner since Mike Hammer.
Pub Date: June 20, 1991
ISBN: 0-679-40283-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
IN THE NEWS
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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