They meet in a no–name diner. A shadowy man hands Burke a CD dossier of someone he wants found. Minutes later, as Burke watches from an alley, his client is gunned down by a professional hunter–killer team. Burke slips away, unsure if he’s been spotted. Later, when he examines the dossier, he discovers that the missing woman is Beryl Preston, a girl he’d rescued from a brutal pimp twenty years earlier—when she was only thirteen—and returned to her father. Now he has to find her again—not only because she might be in danger, but also because he has to prove to himself that his rescue mission hadn’t been financed by a predator who wanted his “property” returned. His search will force him to confront a new kind of human ugliness and, finally, to practice the survivalist triage that has marked—and cursed—his life since childhood. In Mask Market, Burke the outlaw investigator finds himself searching for the truth: not only about a girl named Beryl, but also about himself.
This is classic Burke: dark, dangerous, and galvanizing, from the opening scene to the explosive climax.
“Andrew Vachss is a contemporary master.”
—The Atlanta Journal–Constitution
“Many writers try to cover the same ground as Vachss. A handful are as good. None are better.”
—People
“Vachss’s reverence for storytelling is evident in the blunt beauty of his language.”
—Chicago Sun–Times
“The books of Andrew Vachss are much more than great entertainment. They are a fierce crusade for all victims who can’t fight back, especially the imperiled children to whom Vachss has devoted his considerable talent and his life.”
—Carl Hiaasen
“Vachss is in the first rank of American crime writers.”
—The Plain Dealer
“There’s no way to put a [Vachss book] down once you’ve begun . . . The plot hooks are engaging and the one–liners pierce like bullets.”
—Detroit Free Press
“The best detective fiction being written . . . Add a stinging social commentary [and] a Celinesque journey into darkness, and we have an Andrew Vachss, one of our most important writers.”
—Martha Grimes
“The New York Burke inhabits is not borrowed from anybody and shimmers on the page as gaudily and scarily as it does on the streets.”
—New York magazine
