From Kirkus Reviews
Nobody's earned the right to more attitude than Vachss, a former social services caseworker and prisoner director whose legal clientele is restricted to children. But his swaggering, strutting novels (Choice of Evil, p. 481, etc.) often seem to revel in the catalogue of unwholesome horrors his macho heroes avenge. Vachss' stripped-down, pumped-up prose shows to better advantage in a good half of these 38 stories, since the unspeakable revelations tend to cut off the heat just as the pot is about to boil over. There's room for some hard-won tenderness, too, in stories like ``Proving It'' (a released convict's not-exactly-romantic reunion) and ``True Colors'' (how far will a gang-banger go for his girl?). The four stories about Cross, the Chicago crew chief who always delivers because he has no higher loyalty than the job at hand, are a suitably tough counterweight, along with the title novella, in which Cross and his crew contract to rescue a young woman from a Latin American prison (think Mission: Impossible with a sideshow cast and a body count through the roof). Only the ``Underground'' stories, which wallow in the unspeakable details of child-abuse hell, go over the topor, maybe more accurately, under the bottom. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"Vachss is a contemporary master."--The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Vachss' writing is like a dark roller coaster ride of fear, love and hate." --The Times- Picayune
"Vachss [is] in the first rank of contemporary American crime writers."--The Kansas City Star
"Andrew Vachss has become a cult favorite, and for good reason." --Cosmopolitan
From the Inside Flap
is a contemporary master."--The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Vachss' writing is like a dark roller coaster ride of fear, love and hate." --The Times- Picayune
A hit man defies the confines of a life sentence to avenge his sister's batterer. An immaculately dressed man hires a street gang to extract his daughter from a Central American prison, for reasons as mysterious as they are deadly. A two-bit graffiti artist with a taste for Nazi-ganda finds himself face-to-face with three punks out to make a mark of their own--literally--with a tattoo needle.
From neo-noir master Andrew Vachss comes Everybody Pays, 38 white-knuckle rides into a netherworld of pederasts and prostitutes, stick-up kids and fall guys--where private codes of crime and punishment pulsate beneath a surface system of law and order, and our moral compass spins frighteningly out of control. Here is t
From the Back Cover
"Vachss is a contemporary master."--"The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Vachss' writing is like a dark roller coaster ride of fear, love and hate." --"The Times- Picayune
A hit man defies the confines of a life sentence to avenge his sister's batterer. An immaculately dressed man hires a street gang to extract his daughter from a Central American prison, for reasons as mysterious as they are deadly. A two-bit graffiti artist with a taste for Nazi-ganda finds himself face-to-face with three punks out to make a mark of their own--literally--with a tattoo needle.
From neo-noir master Andrew Vachss comes Everybody Pays, 38 white-knuckle rides into a netherworld of pederasts and prostitutes, stick-up kids and fall guys--where private codes of crime and punishment pulsate beneath a surface system of law and order, and our moral compass spins frighteningly out of control. Here is the street-grit prose that has earned Vachss comparisons to Chandler, Cain, and Hammett--and the ingenious plot twists that transform the double-cross into an expression of retribution, the dark deed into a thing of beauty. Electrifying and enigmatic, Everybody Pays is a sojourn into the nature of evil itself--a trip made all the more frightening by its proximity to our front doorstep.
"Vachss [is] in the first rank of contemporary American crime writers."--"The Kansas City Star
"Andrew Vachss has become a cult favorite, and for good reason." --"Cosmopolitan
About the Author
Andrew Vachss has been a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, a social services caseworker, and a labor organizer, and has directed a maximum-security prison for youthful offenders. Now a lawyer in private practice, he represents children and youths exclusively. He is the author of numerous novels, including the Burke series, three collections of short stories, and a wide variety of other material including song lyrics, graphic novels, and a "children's book for adults." His books have been translated into twenty languages and his work has appeared in Parade, Antaeus, Esquire, Playboy, the New York Times, and numerous other forums. A native New Yorker, he now divides his time between the city of his birth and the Pacific Northwest.
The dedicated Web site for Vachss and his work is vachss.com.
