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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780375725265
ISBN number: 0375725261
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 352
Printing Date: September 11, 2001
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: September 11, 2001
Sale Popularity Level: 477284
Studio: Vintage
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
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.
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Rated by buyers 
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The twelfth novel in this series knocks the wind out of you from the start and never lets up. It's not long before Burke is out of his element and far from home, and it's the very first time in this world that we see him lose his sense of security. And this unsettles us--because unlike most books--it reminds us that these characters don't exist in a vacuum.
The journey will take you deeper into Burke's past and open another chapter in his life. Without giving away plot points, Vachss demonstrates a link between Nazism and pedophiles; one that really exists, but for reasons you cannot possibly imagine.
It's thought provoking, chilling stuff, and it will make you angry.
Rated by buyers 
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His name is Burke. If you've read Vachss before, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, you still know. He's that `good' guy who's so hardened from life's blows he's almost bad. He's the living refutation of the old maxim that lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place. Poor Burke--what hasn't he suffered? Well, I guess you have to cut Vachss a break; after all these Burke novels, he's got to keep coming up with new chips to put on his hero's shoulders, new secrets to reveal, fresh atrocities once suffered. Burke's past is a minefield of post traumatic stress that a fly couldn't land on without detonating; you practically can't ask him if he wants a refill on his coffee without expecting a punch in the mouth. Virtually everything causes him to flash back on some horrific childhood molestation or beating. It's safer to ignore him altogether.
Anyway, that's Burke. Still angry. Still rescuing kids, still chasing down pederasts, still erupting into marginally appropriate rages, even after all these years. More power to him, I guess.
As for *Dead and Gone,* well, this time around he's lured into an ambush. I won't go into details because it ruins the surprise, even though the blockhead who wrote the copy for this novel gives it away right there on the back cover. Burke is grievously wounded, blah blah blah. He struggles grimly to recover, yada yada yada. He's driven by what he's always driven Author name: the thirst for revenge.
Okay, you know you've got to suspend disbelief when you're reading a novel like this. For all its so-called `gritty realism,' it's basically a macho fantasy. The realism only extends to such things like getting the weapons specifications correct, accurately describing the logistics of a boat ride from Key West to Oregon, knowing the latest street nicknames for heroin. Any other contact with the real world is purely incidental. So it is that Burke happens to know an entire community--an entire community!--of underground experts in virtually every specialized field you can imagine. In fact, one seems to materialize out of thin air whenever the situation requires. Need a plastic surgeon, a computer genius, a couple of tons of dynamite. Either Burke knows a guy or he knows a guy who knows a guy. And all these folks are living in the shadows, bad guys ((or gals)) who are really good guys ((or gals)), and they've all been victims of abuse. It's like Robin Hood and his Band of Merry Men. They only hurt the evil and help the innocent. They're called the `Children of the Secret.'
And I'm even willing to buy it. Although, in *Dead and Gone* I think Vachss overuses the device until it becomes a parody of itself. Fact is, Burke spends a lot of time just hanging around places while this or that reclusive outlaw genius figures out where Burke is supposed to go subsequent and upon whom he's supposed to wreak his homicidal tantrum of vengeance. It's a good thing he's picked himself up a spunky girlfriend, a thumb-sucking Cambodian cutie named Gem. Yes, she literally has a thumb-sucking habit. But she doesn't suck her own. She sucks Burke's! She's perfectly okay with her new boyfriend's brooding depressions and psychotic overreactions. His erectile dysfunction--no problem! She'll work with him on that. And she'll go the whole 9 yards, no Viagra shortcut for her. By the end of the novel, she's gotten so used to the unpredictable emotional weather around Burke that when she feels the instantaneous subzero drop in room temperature that tells her she's inadvertently said something to displease her angst-filled new boyfriend, she drops her shorts and bends over for a spanking. He obliges. `Did I suffer enough,' she asks. I kid you not. Burke may have had it rough as a kid, but, man, he's living large now.
You'd think that after swallowing all this, you'd be able to swallow the pay-off of this novel, but Vachss seems almost to be daring you, if he's not trying to choke you altogether. Really, he needs to dip back into the Great Big Book of PC Villains and find himself some new bad guys. Pedophiles, yawn, but fine, if we must, and, after all, that is Burke's whole thing. Even if we must force ourselves to believe that they exist in numbers that would dwarf the population of India, China, and half the United States combined. But I cannot, I simply cannot accept that we still fear the takeover of our government by neo-nazis. Isn't one bogeyman enough? Does Vachss have to throw in the other old bugbear, too? And, on top of it all, in defiance of all reason, propose that white supremacists and pederasts are actually forming an alliance, that they're uniting to form a....well, you'll just have to read it for yourself. It may be too dumb for words, but Vachss has managed to write it down all the same.
Well, I've written a lot about this book and I really didn't dislike ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
This is the twelfth Burke novel by my reckoning - "Pain Management" is the thirteenth - and it's a little different. While some readers may find that hard to accept, it is implicit in Andrew Vachss' style of merciless realism. Without giving too much away, Burke's elaborate defences finally let him down as he accepts one job too many. It spells the end of his life in New York, and very nearly the end of his life period. Things drifted a little out of focus for me as Burke sets out to track down those responsible, winding up in Portland, Oregon with a new identity and a new girlfriend. But then the momentum builds again, relentlessly, to an elegantly understated climax. On the way, we get some more flashes of Burke's early life when he and Wesley befriended a saintly boy with a talent governments would kill to lay their hands on. And pay a flying visit to a place that is almost literally out of this world.
Vachss' style can't be everyone's favourite, or he would be top of the best-seller lists. But I for one rate his books as one of the things that make life worth living.
Rated by buyers -
This is who knows what number in the Burke series. Although each book is a self-contained mystery, you're really best reading the earlier books very first to get a handle on the characters and the flashbacks that occur.
But by this book, things seem a little tedious. Burke spends too much time brooding, and thinking. Yeah we get, bad stuff happened to you, bad stuff happens to other people. You're tortured, you want to hurt others. We get it. Move on already.
The action is pretty slow in this book too, after the inital chapter book spends about a third of the book just 'laying low' and another third slowly tracking down those who hurt him. (read: a lot of waiting, and following. yawn)
Still the character of Burke and his relentless pursuit of those who hurt and prey on children is admirable, even if his methods are usually not. (Although you have to wonder if those people get what they deserve.)
Rated by buyers -
VACHSS IS EXCELLENCE - SOME OF HIS BOOKS ARE MORE DISTURBING THAN OTHERS AND THIS IS ONE OF THEM. BURKE IS A CHARACTER OF A LIFETIME. WITH BURKE , VACHSS HAS ENSURED HIS PLACE IN CONTEMPORARY MYSTERY WRITING AND CAN REST ASSURED THAT HE WILL KEEP MAKING MONEY FOR HIS TRUE PASSION IN LIFE, HELPING CHILDREN.
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