Burke is one of the most cold-blooded yet strangely honorable heroes in the history of crime fction, 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...

Vachss has reinvented detective fiction and, in the person of Burke, his haunted, hell-ridden P.I., has given listeners a new kind of hero. Investigating an epidemic of apparent suicides among the teenagers of a wealthy suburb, Burke discovers a sinister connection between the anguish of the...

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...