Review: Vachss' 'Dead and Gone' tough, rewarding work

"Dead and Gone"
by Andrew Vachss
Alfred A. Knopf
Fiction
334 pages

In this story: Family connections An antidote for age RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Adam Dunn
Special to CNN.com

(CNN) -- "Dead and Gone," the 13th novel featuring hardboiled ex-con Burke, is full of surprises for fans of this street-tough crime series and its unforgettable cast of outlaws.

It takes him out of his home turf (the truly mean streets of New York City), and forces him to reach out for connections long forgotten -- setting him on a vengeful journey which the author has clearly enjoyed creating.

The novel opens with a bang: Burke is ambushed in the Bronx while delivering a ransom payment for a missing child, which was arranged by a Russian mobster. Despite his usual careful preparation and backup plans, Burke goes down in a hail of bullets fired from the very child he thought he was to bring back. In a savage sequence, his faithful killer mastiff, Pansy, is torn to pieces by gunfire in front of his eyes, and Burke himself is dispatched with a bullet in the head.

Burke doesn't so much wake up as lash out in the hospital, pulling out tubes and flailing at the nurses, hallucinating a nightmarish adversary from his ravaged childhood. When the initial storm passes, Burke finds himself immobilized, his face disfigured, one eye gone -- and the police asking questions. Ever the cunning sociopath, Burke feigns amnesia for the cops and hospital staff, all the while nursing his lust for vengeance.

Eventually, Burke manages to escape from the hospital and connects with his "family": Max the Silent, the deaf-mute Mongol warrior; the Prof, his prison-yard schoolteacher; the Mole, the Jews' explosive answer to the Final Solution; and Michelle, the transsexual hustler extraordinaire. All convene under the watchful eye of Mama Wong, whose restaurant offers nearly every sort of black-market commerce except food.

As usual, the Prof (which is short for "Professor" or "Prophet," depending on which book readers first encounter him) gives Burke the score: "Whoever tried to ice you, it cost someone some serious money. Took a lot of time, involved a lot of people. That's got to be personal. The people who tried to do the job, I figure them for mercs ... But the rest, that was about blood ... someone who knows you enough to figure you'd go for that kid-exchange thing, too." Burke's life's mission -- to punish those who sexually abuse children, as happened to him -- has become a sign on his back.

Now Burke has to trace whomever set up the hit before they figure out he's still alive, and try again. And this is where "Dead and Gone" veers sharply away from its predecessors. Burke must leave New York and his precious safety net for the West Coast, and swap his urban habitat for a mountainous one -- all without backup, and with the clock ticking.

Author Andrew Vachss' antihero Burke, a career criminal, is back again in "Dead and Gone"

No con with a sheet as long as Burke's is fully without resources, however. Calling in some favors, Burke hooks up with Byron, an old pal from a mercenary stint in Biafra, and through Mama's machinations, Burke is introduced to Gem, a survivor of Cambodia's killing fields, who acts as a go-between for Burke and the Russians who set him up. With the stage set for a new and possibly enduring love interest in Burke's life (assuming she survives), Burke sets out to find Lune, a fellow veteran of his own days in juvenile facilities, whose twisted genius may be able to give Burke the answers he needs to stay alive and wreak his revenge.

Byron and Lune together constitute an important axis of background for the author. Burke's past has never been so much described as hinted at in various novels, and given the length of the series, it seems like Vachss sensed this was an opportune time to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. Byron provides some back story on Burke's military background, and Lune (short for "Lunatic") offers details of Burke's horrific childhood, including his association with the dreaded killer Wesley from previous books, whom Burke has both feared and admired.

"Dead and Gone" is a good example of an antidote for the worst enemy of a series: age. Burke's "family" is now old enough to have had its own "children," though not strictly in the biological sense. Various secondary characters have been introduced in different novels, each allying themselves with one of the original cast, and Vachss has seamlessly woven them in. Burke himself has only had his dog and a succession of women, and removing him from this line while filling in many of the missing pieces of his past seems to freshen the emphasis on him as a long-standing protagonist.

Moreover, Vachss has not abandoned the literary device which firmly plants Burke in the tradition of scarred private eyes in a world gone rotten: dialogue.

While Burke may be from the wrong side of the tracks, each novel is a mystery surrounding the dark underworld of child abuse, and Vachss lets his clues slip to the reader in clipped exchanges between Burke and his cronies. The author practices what he preaches; as an attorney specializing in child-abuse cases, Mr. Vachss is able to draw on myriad instances of real-world ugliness, almost too sordid to be presented in anything but small doses.

This makes for aphoristic chapter fragments, but it also drives the pace of each novel, offering the reader just enough information to try to beat Burke to his quarry. With "Dead and Gone," the plot bobs and weaves so much between Burke's past and present that readers have their work cut out for them.

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The Zero: Official Home Page of Andrew Vachss
Alfred A. Knopf (Random House)

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