Mask Market

(Pantheon Books, 244 pages)THE career criminal known only as Burke meets a nervous citizen in a no-name New York diner. The man hands Burke a dossier on a missing woman and offers him a lot of money to track her down. Moments later, as Burke watches from the shadows, the man is shot dead in the street by a team of professional assassins.So begins Mask Market, the 16th novel in Andrew Vachss’ series featuring Burke, one of the most intriguing characters in modern crime fiction.

For the uninitiated, a brief Burke biography is in order: Abandoned at birth, he was beaten and raped in a series of foster homes, ran away, turned to crime to survive and found his true family — “family by choice and not by blood” — in prison and on the streets.

Burke is well into middle-age now, but his needs and motives remain simple and pure: good blues on the stereo, loyalty to his tight circle of underworld friends, and revenge. Two passages that roughly bookend the new novel explain his philosophy of life.

“You come up knowing that faith is for suckers,” Burke says. “The only god I ever worshipped was the one who answered my prayers. My religion is revenge.”

Later, he adds this: “In my world, you get even because you’re nothing if you don’t, but it’s never enough. It can’t be. You can’t REALLY get even. You can make someone who hurt you dead, but whatever they took from you is never coming back.”

The people Burke wants revenge on, of course, are child molesters. In every novel, he finds creative ways to rob a few of them, grisly ways to kill a few of them, or both.

Burke is Vachss’ alter ego, doing what Vachss would be doing himself if there weren’t laws against that sort of thing. What he does instead is use his considerable skills as an investigator and lawyer to track down child abusers, sue them on behalf of their victims and lobby tirelessly for stronger child protections laws and services. Now 63, he has devoted his entire adult life to this cause, which the proceeds from his novels help support.

Burke has been around for 21 years now, accumulating a rich history that the new novel takes for granted. Readers new to the series will find themselves wondering who Wesley was and why everyone is afraid to speak his name even though he is dead; how come Burke still grieves piteously for his long-dead bull mastiff, Pansy; why Burke shows such deference to a Chinese restaurant owner known only as Mamma; and why our macho hero hangs out with a post-op transsexual named Michelle.

So, instead of diving into Mask Market, why not start with Flood <$>(1985), and read all 16 Burke novels in order. A couple of them read like they were just dashed off as propaganda for the cause, but the rest, including Mask Market, are fine stories well told.

And Vachss’ prose is as hard-boiled as writing can get.