Safe House. - Hardcover

Safe House offers up Vachss's repertoire of repeat characters. The most fascinating are Burke's prison "family," the Prof, Max the silent, the Mole, Michelle, Clarence, Mama, and, of course, Burke himself, who is as hard-edged as ever. The family's willingness to help one another, even die for one another, is the emotional string that ties the books together. There are also two new female characters, Vyra, the affluent Jewish housewife and Crystal Beth, half Inuit, half Irish safe house madam. Though not as believable as their male counterparts, Vyra and Crystal Beth have powerful secrets of their own and add a soft, human element to the story.

Like other Vachss novels, Safe House embraces the dirty, grim life of the ex-con for hire. The most compelling aspect of Safe House is Vachss's no-holds-barred writing style. He spares nobody's feeling and minces no words in this rough, gritty and often painfully raw crime story. --Mara Friedman

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."

"Safe House comes at you with the speed of a bullet train, a style as spare and stripped down as origami, and Andrew Vachss' usual black-as-pitch theme--the abuse of innocence. Yet for all of their dark modernity, Vachss' novels are inheritors of the 19th century social criticism, as much Dickens and Defoe as Hammett and Chandler." (Martha Grimes)

"More than just rough talk and slick prose, each page of Safe House reads like a literary title fight with Vachss trying to put every other pulp writer down for the count. Tough, terse, vivid, Vachss keeps pouring on until, from equal measure bruising and pleasure, the reader screams 'No more, baby, no more.' If it were any more real you'd get twenty-five to life just for cracking the cover." (John Ridley)