Andrew Vachss: Down in the Zero (UK 1996)

From the Publisher:
'I'd been quiet a long time. Since I went into that house and killed a child. He didn't have a life to live anyway. Probably would have killed himself if he had the chance. Gone over. Down into the Zero.'

'Vachss writes like a cold switchblade. full of extraordinary and powerful imagery' TIME OUT

Hard-hitting New York attorney, Andrew Vachss, turns the crime novel on its head creating a starkly real criminal underworld and a different kind of hero -- an outcast, street-sharp, ex-con turned licensed PI, Burke who makes his living dispensing cruel but measured justice.

Down in the Zero finds him on the mean and wealthy streets of a Connecticut suburb riddled with teenage suicides and sheltering an underground sado-masochistic group. The setting may be plush, but Andrew Vachss's world is as uncompromising as ever...

'The writing is awesomely brutal' -- SUNDAY TIMES

Andrew Vachss: Down in the Zero. Macmillan, ISBN: 0330341669 (October, 1996), 259 p., £4.99.

Andrew Vachss: Down in the Zero (UK 1995)

From the Publisher:
Back cover:
'I'd been quiet a long time. Since I went into that house and killed a child. Killed a child. I can say it now. Every word. One at a time. Over and over again. I went in shooting.
I wasn't trying to rescue the kid - I didn't know he was there. He didn't have a life to live anyway - I told myself that. Probably would have killed himself if he had the chance. Gone over. Down into the Zero. That's how this last business started. With kids killing themselves.'

Praise for Andrew Vachss's work
'Vachss writes like a cold switchblade... - full of extraordinary and powerful imagery' -- TIME OUT
'The writing is awesomely brutal' -- SUNDAY TIMES

Front flap:
PI Burke is back for another horrifying journey into the seamy underworld where childhood doesn't exist.
Andrew Vachss has infused the modern crime novel with stark reality and a different kind of hero -- an outcast, street-sharp, ex-con turned licensed PI, who makes his living dispensing cruel but measured justice. Down in the Zero finds Burke on the mean and wealthy streets of a Connecticut suburb riddled with teenage suicides and sheltering an underground sadomasochistic group.

The setting may be plush, but Andrew Vachss's world is as bleak as ever - 'eerie, real, excruciating. His bad guys will make your skin crawl, and his good guys aren't much better... Uncomfortable terrain, covered brilliantly.'

Andrew Vachss: Down in the Zero. Macmillan, ISBN: 0333602234 (December, 1995), 259 p., £16.99.

Andrew Vachss: Down in the Zero (USA 1995)

From the Publisher:
"Deliciously scummy.... His bad guys are memorably heinous." -- Washington Post Book World
Andrew Vachss has reinvented detective fiction for an age in which guilty secrets are obsolete and murder isn't even worth a news headline. And in the person of his haunted, hell-ridden private eye Burke, Vachss has given us a new kind of hero: a man inured to every evil except the kind that preys on children.

Now Burke is back, investigating an epidemic of apparent suicides among teenagers of a wealthy Connecticut suburb. There he discovers a sinister connection between the anguish of the young and the activities of an elite sadomasochistic underground, for whom pan and its accompanying rituals are a source of pleasure -- and power

"[Vachss's] short sharp sentences crackle with energy; his plots are satisfyingly elaborate; the narratives are beautifully paced, and the characters... are always pungently individual." -- Chicago Sun-Times
"The characters and events are as sharply defined as if they were etched in steel. The prose is short and choppy, like the ticking of a time bomb about to explode." -- Seattle Post Intelligencer

Andrew Vachss: Down in the Zero. Vintage Crime / Black Lizard, ISBN: 0679760660 (July, 1995), 272 p., $11.00.

Andrew Vachss: Down in the Zero (USA 1994)

From the Publisher:
"Baby Boy Burke" it says on his birth certificate - Father Unknown. Raised in a series of foster homes, orphanages and "reform" schools, and viciously abused in each. Two prison terms and a lifetime later, Burke is still an an urban survivalist who doesn't exist on paper, working the jagged edges of the criminal underworld. He's a man for hire, but you have to earn the right to trust him. The dark heart of six previous novels by Andrew Vachss - Flood, Strega, Blue Belle, Hard Candy, Blossom and Sacrifice - Burke's earned the title "lord of the asphalt jungle" (Washington Post). And now, after a hiatus of three years, he's back.

Still mourning the death of a child whose life he took instead of saved, Burke feels the pull of the Zero - the abyss that lies beyond death. Alone with his sorrow, he's been quiet for a long time when he gets the phone call. It's from a kid named Randy claiming to be the son of a woman Burke once knew, and still owes. The kid's plush Connecticut suburb has been hit with a rash of inexplicable teenage "suicides." He's sure he could be next and he wants a bodyguard. Burke's no professional bullet-catcher, but he goes along for two Randy's mother did save him a prison stretch years ago. And the kid's neighborhood is lousy with cash.

Lousy with other things too. Burke quickly discovers that the picture-perfect community hides the nerve center of an intense erotic underground where S&M sex is sold, traded... and recorded. As Burke moves down the pipeline to where the cluster suicides began, he finds himself in wealthy homes where the term "emotional abuse" takes euphemism to new heights - and depths.

And when a beautiful dominatrix with an ugly secret introduces him to a hideous new version of "legal" kiddie porn, Burke's rage drags him back from the Zero's edge and into a shadowy war with barely visible, shape-shifting enemies.

Consumed by grave-dancing with his own demons, Burke is quickly cornered. But his trappers are about to discover exactly what kind of quarry they've got...

Andrew Vachss: Down in the Zero. A Novel. Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN: 0679433287 (August, 1994), 259 p., $21.00.