Andrew Vachss: Strega (USA 1996)

From the Publisher:
"An absolute stunner, the toughest crime novel, and one of the most realistic, any American writer has produced." -- Cleveland Plain Dealer
Andrew Vachss's implacable private eye has a new client, Strega. She wants Burke to find an obscene photograph -- and that search will take him into the ocean that flows just beneath the city, an ocean whose currents are trash and money, raw anguish and cheap sex, and the pleasure of twisted adults. It is a place that Burke can visit only at the risk of his sanity and his life. But between the power of Strega and his own sense of justice, there is no turning back.

In Strega one of our most acclaimed crime writers gives us a thriller that might have been imagined by Dante. For this is a tour of hell with no stops left out, conducted by a novelist who writes with the authority of the damned.

"It's wonderful. The words leap off the page. The plot is fresh. The principal character is original. The style is as clean as a haiku." -- Washington Post Book World
"A bizarre, fast-paced tour of the criminal psyche... has a grim authenticity." -- Philadelphia Inquirer

Andrew Vachss: Strega. Vintage Crime / Black Lizard, ISBN: 0679764097 (January, 1996), 293 p., $11.00.

Andrew Vachss: Strega (UK 1988)

From the Publisher:
'STREGA... A WITCH/BITCH YOU COULD LUST AFTER OR RUN FROM. AND I HAD TAKEN HER MONEY'
Burke's done his time and now he's just doing his jobs on the side. usually the wild side. The sore-knuckled minder job that old Julio the godfather handed him was one thing. But it led to another job that was another thing altogether.

Finding a polaroid print of an eight-year-old boy in a citywide sea of kiddie porn was the job. A hundred grand was the pay off. And Strega, the flame-haired mafia princess making sexual offers he couldn't refuse was the client. Burke's wondering how the hell he got into all this...

'BURKE... IS A CON-MAN, A SURVIVOR, A CYNIC, AND A VERY DANGEROUS GUY. I'VE NOT MET A CHARACTER SO TOUGH AND YET SO ATTRACTIVE' DAVID MORRELL in THE WASHINGTON POST

FIRST BRITISH PUBLICATION

Andrew Vachss: Strega. The sensational new thriller from the author of FLOOD. Pan, ISBN: 0330301802 (February, 1988), 293 p., £2.99.

Andrew Vachss: Strega (USA 1987)

From the Publisher:
BURKE IS BACK!
Andrew Vachss's gripping new thriller -- even more dazzling and shocking than his first novel, Flood -- returns us to the seamy underworld of New York City in the company of the ex-con / scam artist / private eye whose self-appointed mission is to make the world unsafe for child molesters (and stay out of jail while doing it).

This time Burke is on the trail of a photograph -- a single snapshot that's out there amidst a sea of kiddie porn, a snapshot that haunts the dreams of a sexually abused six-year-old boy. The search propels Burke into the world he calls home: the secret haunts of mobsters and hustlers, peddlers and prostitutes, in the catacombs of lower Manhattan, the dimly lit streets of river-front Brooklyn, and the neon precincts of Times Square. And as he fits together the pieces of this bizarre puzzle, Burke is assisted by his extraordinary crew of friends, who, like Burke himself, walk both sides of the law:

• MA WONG -- the Chinatown restaurateur (she's somewhere between fifty and ninety years old) who provides both cover and Cantonese delicacies for her "son" Burke

• MICHELLE -- the almost-transsexual prostitute, always willing to do Burke just the right kind of favor
• Max-the mute Mongolian powerhouse, "the lifetaking, widow-making silent wind of death," whose lethal body does all his talking for him, and often for Burke

• PROF -- short for Prophet, whose street smarts are as highly developed as his rhyme scheme (*I never fall because I see it all") is simple

• IMMACULATA -- the Vietnamese psychotherapist whose first concern is her young clients at the clinic for sexually abused children, and who can be as spiky. as her heels and dark-lacquered talons suggest

• MOLE -- "not the kind of human you'd want to make eye. contact with," avowed Nazi hunter and jack-of-all-questionable-trades, whose home-away-from-prison is a South Bronx junkyard

Andrew Vachss: Strega. A Novel. Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN: 0394559371 (March, 1987), 293 p., $18.95.