Dead and Gone

by Andrew Vachss

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375725261
• ISBN13: 9780375725265
• Release Date: September 2001
• Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.9" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Burke's back in shape, folks.

With "Dead and Gone," Burke undergoes an intense rebirth. After surviving a set-up, he's back to the ground-zero tension that fuels Vachss' best work. The last 50 pages present a whole lot of Burke's backstory. His closest partner, Pansy, goes out stone loyal. Much as it hurt to read Pansy's death, "Dead and Gone" breathes new life into the franchise.The "Who wants Burke dead?" search is complicated, but the payoff is a genuine surprise. Turns out our antihero didn't have this person pegged as accurately as he thought. The bad guys are trying to found a pedophile's paradise. Burke wants to keep Burke alive, and this leads him back to the crusade that defines him - fighting dirty for the Children of the Secret.As in "Sacrifice," Burke has to deal with...well, "performance" issues. Given the loss and grief endemic to Burke (especially in this book), it's a more realistic and interesting approach than the "no woman can satisfy him" school of detective fiction. Plus, it sets the stage for Gem to be the heroine. She brings hope and even some humor to the whole thing. You can pretty much nail down Burke's age this time - he was nineteen during the 1969 Biafra genocide.Now he's on the West Coast. Ripe new territory for a vengeful con-man who's legally dead...

Return to Darkness

As a big fan of Andrew Vachss, both as a writer and as a human being, I was very pleased with the latest Burke novel, "Dead and Gone." In fact, this is easily his best novel since "Footsteps of the Hawk". While the intermediate books were very good, they were a little more light in literary content than his previous works. That is not to say they weren't good. Vachss is usually several times better than the average crime/mystery writer. But they were fairly flawed. "False Allegations" became essentially a treatise on abuse and false memories/allegations (which is Vachss' primary concern when writing his Burke novels, abuse of children) and came off a little flat. Likewise, his next novels "Safe House" and "Choice of Evil", while developing chillingly evil antagonists for Burke (particularly in "Choice of Evil"), were fairly by the numbers in terms of plot. The death of Burke's girlfriend in "Choice of Evil" didn't have the impact it probably should have."Dead and Gone" however, takes Burke back into his darkest roots. Burke is ambushed, blinded by gunfire, and a primary character who has been present throughout the series is murdered. Burke seeths for revenge, but must vanish in order to achieve it. And the answer to that revenge may lay in Burke's violent past.The characterization of Burke here is utterly frightening. This is the Burke of "Flood" and "Down in the Zero", the Burke who likes to share his pain with whatever monster he can get his hands on. The streetwise, amoral predator at work. Through his eyes, the reader is shown a world we are loathe to even acknowledge, much less see. A world the average person cannot even begin to imagine. Naturally Vachss, through Burke, wants us to see this world, forces us to see. It is there, and only when we all see it, Vachss tells us, can this world be destroyed.Be warned, this is not the book to begin with if you are a new Vachss reader. There is a definite connection to events of previous novels of the series, and unless a person has read the whole serious, the relevance of who the antagonist is will mean nothing.Also be warned: Vachss has an agenda. He wants to show people a part of the world that most refuse to admit even exists. Some people may not appreciate this full throttle initiation. Vachss must be read. But he should not be read without mental preparation first.

Just when you thought you knew everything....

Just when you thought you knew everything about Burke, the anti-antihero of Andrew Vachss's crime fiction, along comes Dead and Gone. If you're new to Burke's world, this probably isn't the book to start with. It's as much (if not more) of a page-turner as the previous eleven novels in which Burke is featured, and the uninitiated reader will certainly find it entertaining. But to fully appreciate the revelations here, you ought to read at least one earlier effort. For those who have, and had concluded that Burke was about as malleable as titanium, this book will surprise you. There's nothing forced about the changes, either. After he is very nearly assassinated, and he watches a loved one die before his eyes, you know Burke will not emerge the same. What we learn about him as a result adds immeasurably to the depth of one of the most complex and memorable characters in crime fiction. On second thought, make that fiction period.

Another intense, hard edged romp. Vachss never disappoints!

Burke gets in quickly over his head, and after he loses a team member- he is burning mad. Vachss's whole Burke series never lets down butthis is one of the best. Having moved to the Pacific NorthWest,originally from Boston, I was overjoyed that Burke's search forNeo-Nazis would take him to my new environs. As usual Vachss is up todate on everything from aryan psychos to high techno wizardry. My only criticism thus far of Vachss are that sometimes his endings can bepredictable. This book however is a roller coaster ride with a unpredictabletwisted turn at the end. A delight the whole ride!

The darkest chapter yet...

Andrew Vachss' novels about the character known only as Burke are as tough and painful - and as deeply resonant and powerful - as any books ever written. DEAD AND GONE, this new Burke novel, takes the main character - and the reader - to new depths of pain, compassion, and vengeance.From the beginning, you know this one is going to be very different. Burke, who lives in the gray frontier between law and lawlessness, has confronted the worst of human monsters in his previous books, people who prey upon children, who commit the unforgivable crime of murdering innocence. Burke's crusade to obliterate such creatures (which mirrors that of attorney/children's right advocate Vachss) has earned him the enmity of a great many people, and one of them has planned Burke's death. The plot nearly succeeds, and by the end of the first dozen pages, one of Burke's closest friends lies dead, and Burke himself is nearly killed, losing the sight in one eye.His goal now is revenge, not only for himself, but for the loss of the one living creature closest to him. In effect, Burke becomes "dead and gone," vanishing even beneath the radar of the underground's whisper-stream, in order to track down those responsible. The motives for the attack, however, turn out to be more than just a desire for Burke's death, which he learns with the assistance of Gem, a young Cambodian woman who becomes one of Burke's aides and more, and Burke's old friend Lune, who has developed a system of drawing order and patterns from seeming chaos.The novel is filled with rich and enigmatic characters, dark and gritty settings, and terse, ice-cold prose. What sets it apart from the other books, however, is the change that occurs in Burke, not just physically, but psychologically. There is a spiritual death and rebirth here, a learning process with lessons so hard that I doubt if anyone with less rigor than Burke could survive them. But survive them he does, and comes out on the other side changed, and for the better. We are in the presence of a different Burke by the book's end, no less intense, no less dedicated to his goals, no less devoted to his chosen family, but a Burke who has learned other ways of dealing with his enemies and with his fears, and perhaps a Burke who is, at long last, loved, and who has learned to accept and give love in return.The Burke saga is no literary franchise, but a series written with depth and passion. Unlike most series characters, Burke grows, develops, and changes, and Vachss has chronicled these changes with dark brilliance. DEAD AND GONE is a defining chapter and an enlightening moment of transition in the long, hard story of Burke. At the same time, it is a stark, compassionate, and strangely different novel by one of the most original and ferocious voices in American fiction. I cannot recommend it too highly.