Book 1

Flood

by Andrew H. Vachss

Published 23 September 1985

Burke's newest client is a woman named Flood, who has the face of an angel, the body of a high-priced stripper, and the skills of a professional executioner. She wants Burke to find a monster for her--so she can kill him with her bare hands.

In this cauterizing thriller, Andrew Vachss's renegade investigator teams up with a lethally gifted avenger to follow a child's murderer through the catacombs of New York, where every alley is blind and the penthouses are as dangerous as the basements. Fearfully knowing, crackling with narrative tension, and written in prose as forceful as a hollow-point slug, Flood is Burke at his deadliest--and Vachss at the peak of his form.


Book 2

Strega

by Andrew H. Vachss

Published 12 February 1987
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 flesh and money, the anguish of children 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.

Book 3

Blue Belle

by Andrew H. Vachss

Published 12 August 1988

            Burke is one of the most cold-blooded yet strangely honorable heroes in the history of crime fiction, an outlaw who makes his living by preying on the most vicious of New York City’s bottom-feeders, those who thrive on the suffering of children.
            In Andrew Vachss’s tautly engrossing novel Burke is given a purse full of dirty money to find the infamous Ghost Van that is cutting a lethal swath among the teenage prostitutes in the ‘hood.  He also gets help in the form of a stripper named Belle, whose moves on the runway are outclassed only by what she can do in a getaway car.  But not even Burke is prepared for the evil that is behind the Ghost Van or for the sheer menace of its guardian, a cadaverous karate expert who enjoys killing so much that he has named himself after death.


Book 4

Hard Candy

by Andrew H. Vachss

Published 11 June 1989
In this mercilessly compelling thriller, Burke—the private eye, sting artist, and occasional hit man who metes out a cruelly ingenious vengeance on those who victimize children—is up against a soft-spoken messiah, who may be rescuing runaways or recruiting them for his own hideous purposes. But in doing so Burke becomes a target for an entire Mafia family, a whore with a heart of cyanide, and a contract killer as implacable as a heat-seeking missile. Written with Vachss's signature narrative overdrive—and his unnerving familiarity with the sub-basement of American crime—Hard Candy is vintage Burke.

Book 5

Blossom

by Andrew H. Vachss

Published 16 June 1990

In the figure of Burke, Andrew Vachss has given contemporary crime fiction one of its most mesmerizing characters. An abused child raised in orphanages, foster homes, and prisons, Burke is a career criminal and outlaw who steals and scams for a living. 
   In Blossom, an old cellmate has summoned Burke to a fading Indiana mill town, where a young boy is charged with a crime he didn't commit and a twisted serial sniper has turned a local lovers' lane into a killing field. And it's here that Burke meets Blossom, the brilliant, beautiful young woman who has her own reasons for finding the murderer—and her own idea of vengeance.  Dense with atmosphere, savagely convincing, this is Vachss at his uncompromising best.


Book 6

Sacrifice

by Andrew H. Vachss

Published 11 June 1991
What—or who—could turn a gifted little boy into a murderous thing that calls itself "Satan's Child"? In search of an answer, a man named Burke travels from a festering welfare hotel to a neat frame house where a voodoo priestess presides over a congregation of assassins.  For this vigilante and unlicensed private eye has made it his business to defend the small victims whom the law has failed—even a child who has been made into a killer.

Gripping and chillingly knowledgeable about the mechanisms of evil, Sacrifice is a thriller of savage authority from one of the best crime writers of our generation.

Book 9

False Allegations

by Andrew H. Vachss

Published 22 October 1996
Burke--ex-con, mercenary, sometime killer--makes his living preying on New York's most vicious predators and avenging their innocent victims. But in Andrew Vachss's mercilessly suspenseful new novel, Burke finds himself working the other side of the street, where guilt and innocence are as disposable as the sheets in a Times Square hotel--and as dirty.

Burke's new employer is Kite, a fanatical crusader who specializes in debunking "false allegations  of child sexual abuse. Kite has a case that may be the real thing, but needs Burke to tell him if it is. And if mere money can't persuade Burke to cooperate, Kite has plenty of other incentives at his disposal--including a fanatical bodyguard with a taste for corsets and brass knuckles. A tour guide to hell written in icy prose, False Allegations is Vachss at his most unnerving.

Book 10

Safe House

by Andrew H. Vachss

Published 24 March 1998

In Burke, Vachss gave readers of crime fiction a hero they could believe in, an avenger whose sense of justice was forged behind bars and tempered on New York's meanest streets.  In this blistering new thriller, Burke is drawn into his ugliest case yet, one that involves an underground network of abused women and the sleekly ingenious stalkers who've marked them as their personal victims. 
   
   Burke's client is Crystal Beth, a beautiful outlaw with a tattoo on her face and a mission burned into her heart.  She is trying to shield one of her charges from a vengeful ex with fetishes for Nazism and torture. But the stalker has a protector, someone so informed, so ruthless, and so connected that he need only make a few phone calls to shut down Crystal Beth's operation for good—and Burke along with it.  Sinuous in its complexities, brutal in its momentum, Safe House is Burke at the edge of his nerve and cunning.  And it's Vachss at the peak of his form.


Book 11

Choice of Evil

by Andrew H. Vachss

Published 27 April 1999
When his girlfriend, Crystal Beth, is gunned down at a gay rights rally in Central Park, Burke, the underground man-for-hire and expert hunter of predators, vows vengeance.  But someone beats him to the task: a shadowy killer who calls himself Homo Erectus and who seems determined to wipe gay bashers from the face of the earth.  As the killer's body count rises, most citizens are horrified, but a few see him as a hero, and they hire Burke to track him down...and help him escape.

In Choice of Evil, Burke is forced to confront his most harrowing mystery: the mind of an obsessive serial killer.  And soon the emotionally void method behind the killer's madness becomes terrifyingly familiar, reminding Burke of his childhood partner, Wesley, the ice-man assassin who never missed, even when the target was himself.  Has Wesley come back from the dead?  The whisper-stream says so.  And the truth may just challenge Burke's very sense of reality.  Expertly plotted, addictive, enthralling, Choice of Evil is Andrew Vachss' most haunting tale to date.

Book 13

Pain Management

by Andrew H. Vachss

Published 1 January 2001
Burke is back, but still lurking in the shadows, unable to return home. He is prowling the unfamiliar streets of Portland, Oregon, in search of a runaway teen. By all accounts, Rosebud Carlin is a happy, well-adjusted girl. She doesn’t fit the profile of the runaway kids Burke knows so wellÉand once was. But there’s something about her fatherÉ

Burke knows the street script, but the actors are all strangers. Cut off from his family and his network of criminal contacts, Burke is forced into a dangerous alliance with a renegade group dedicated to providing relief to those in intractable pain by any means necessary. A bargain is struck, and the fuse is lit. Heart-stopping and hard-hitting, Pain Management is the latest bout in Andrew Vachss's thrilling reign as undisputed champ of brass knuckles noir.

Book 14

Only Child

by Andrew H. Vachss

Published 1 January 2002
It’s been years since Burke has been home, years since he’s seen his “family” and worked in the underbelly of New York City. Although his appearance has changed, his reputation grown dusty and his wallet thin, his skills and his crew remain razor sharp. So when he is contacted by a mob boss to investigate the murder of his illegitimate daughter, Vonni, Burke takes the job and begins searching for an unspeakably brutal killer.

Posing as a casting director looking for tomorrow’s stars, Burke reaches out to the high school students who knew Vonni, and may know the identity of the killer. Before long he unearths a perverse enterprise—a young director pursuing a brutal new type of cinema verité.

Book 15

Down Here

by Andrew H. Vachss

Published 1 January 2004

Book 18

Another Life

by Andrew H. Vachss

Published 1 January 2008

Terminal

by Andrew H. Vachss

Published 25 September 2007

Mask Market

by Andrew H. Vachss

Published 1 January 2006

Footsteps of the Hawk

by Andrew H. Vachss

Published 29 August 1995
PI Burke, New York's avenging angel, is asked by a policewoman to clear the name of her boyfriend, jailed for murder. She claims he was framed by a psychopathic policeman who is also out to get Burke. To Burke, it all sounds "treacherous bad," but he takes the case anyway.