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Andrew Vachss

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Terminal: A Burke Novel (Burke Series Book 17) Kindle Edition

by Andrew Vachss (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.4 135 ratings

Book 17 of 18: The Ugly Daughter

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After years of carefully working the edges, a blood-commitment forces Burke's return to his former career: "violence-for-money." Claw, once the shot-caller of a white supremacist prison gang is free . . . and terminally ill--he desperately needs a pile of cash to bet on a long-shot cure. He tells Burke about a punk who once purchased protection from him, a man who claims to know the truth behind a "cold case, " the unsolved rape-murder of a thirteen-year-old girl. The killers are all weathly men today, ideal blackmail marks. But wealth is power, and the informant needs Claw's protection again. Burke decides to roll the dice. A win would give Burke the two things he lives for: Money and Revenge. A loss would turn "terminal" from a diagnosis into a certainly, and not just for Claw.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Vachss's 17th Burke novel (after 2006's Mask Murder) combines gritty realism with an over-the-top depiction of an omniscient spy network. Claude Dremdell, a white supremacist whose sole hope against his terminal illness is a pricy experimental Swiss treatment, ropes Burke into a plot to extort money from three wealthy men who years earlier committed a brutal murder (loosely based on the real-life Martha Moxley case), but were never suspected. Armed with only fragmentary evidence in the form of two checks, Burke turns for help to an Israeli intelligence operation working covertly in the U.S. with superhuman powers of information gathering. Lengthy tirades about the failures of the criminal justice system under the current Bush administration will distract even those who agree with them. In the end, the violent vengeance Burke seeks overshadows the worthy points Vachss makes about the continuing horrific sexual abuse of the young.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"Illuminates both the darkest excesses of criminality and, in counterpoint, the slack-jawed solipsism of the law-abiding."—Time Out Chicago“Vachss's prose is as taut and streetwise as ever, drawing his readers again into an evil underworld that is at once impossible to look away from and horrible to behold."—Associated Press"Burke is the hardest, most twisted man in crime and thriller fiction."—Contra Costa Times “Transcends the crime novel even further. . . . Like a lecture from the smartest raconteur you never want to meet.”—The Seattle Times

From the Trade Paperback edition.

About the Author

David Joe Wirth has performed at numerous theatres in New York City, Chicago, London, and Paris working with such notable persons as David Mamet, Robert Falls, Roger Donaldson, and Stuart Ross. David can be heard performing the audio version of Two Trains Running by Andrew Vachss. He is proud to serve on the Advisory Board of PROTECT, the National Association to PROTECT Children.

Andrew Vachss is a lawyer who represents children and youths exclusively. His many novels and two collections of short stories have been translated into twenty languages, and his work has appeared in Parade, Esquire, Playboy, and The New York Times, among other publications. A native New Yorker, he divides his time between the city of his birth and the Pacific Northwest.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I got to the job site a couple of hours early. The kind of work I do, you show up too late, sometimes you don’t get to go home when it’s over.

Gigi was already planted in his spot, his enormous body mass taking up most of a wooden bench, a half-empty pitcher of beer on a little table to his right. The behemoth had a perfect sight-line on the front door, but his tiny eyes were too deeply flesh-pouched for me to tell where he was looking. Wrapped in a faded gray jersey pulled over drawstring pants of the same material, he looked like a moored battleship.

I found a stool at the far end of the bar. The guy behind the stick had a little slice of forehead and less chin. His eyes showed signs of life—I guessed somewhere around geranium level.

I ordered a shot—nobody does brand names in a joint like this. The inbred blinked a couple of times, then brought me some brown liquid. I asked him for a glass of water. He stared at me for a minute. You could see his mind working—it wasn’t a pretty sight. Finally, enough tumblers fell into place. He reached under the bar and came up with a glass the EPA wouldn’t allow you to dump without a permit.

The TV set was suspended from the ceiling by cables at the opposite end of the bar from where I was sitting. Some baseball game was on. I was too far away to hear the sound, or even make out who was playing, but I watched the moving images. Reminded me of being Inside. They rig the TV in the dayroom the same way, probably for the same reason. Most guys want to be outdoors every chance they get, but there’s cons who know their soaps better than any housewife.

Usually, I drink the water, slip the whiskey into the water glass, let the ice melt into it, and then ask for another. If I think anyone might be watching close, I transfer by mouth. I was raised in places where you learn to do that with meds you don’t want, watched by “staff” who hoped you’d refuse—restraints and hypos were more fun for them.

Eventually, the bartender takes away both glasses, brings me a “same again,” and everybody’s happy. Any regular interested in the stranger sees a man drinking solo, dedicated to his work. In a place like this, you sit by yourself not drinking, it’s like a red neon arrow pointing at you. Down at you.

But I watched how other guys at the bar had to practically scream to get the inbred’s attention. He mostly just stood there, in the Zen state of just being the mouth-breathing genetic misfire that he was. So I nursed my drink the way a crack-addict mother nurses her kid—if it could figure out how to drink itself, fine.

Forty minutes later, a man in a bone-colored leather sports coat shoulder-rolled in and sat down in an empty booth. Late thirties, with a tanning-bed complexion. He sported a hundred-dollar short haircut—gelled, not spiked. His wristwatch was crusted with diamonds; a three-strand loop of eighteen-karat draped against a black silk collarless pullover.

The battleship slowly broke loose from its mooring and started across the room. From behind me, two torpedoes cut across his wake. As the first passed by where I was sitting, I slid the length of rebar out of my sleeve, gripped the taped end, and took out his knee from behind. The other whirled at his partner’s scream, but I was already swinging. His collarbone snapped under the ridged steel whip.

The guy in the bone-colored jacket never made it out of his booth.

I was one of the men who flowed around Gigi like river water around a big rock, all of us heading for the door. The sidewalk was empty, except for a squat-bodied man in a wheelchair. He had a begging cap on the ground next to him, one hand under the army blanket spread across his lap. Nobody gave him a second glance.

The battleship was docked at a pier overlooking the Brooklyn Navy Yard, behind the wheel of an ancient black Caddy. He covered more than half of the front seat; the steering wheel was hidden somewhere under his upper body. A thick skullcap of wiry black hair covered his bowling ball of a head. I was standing next to him, talking through the opened window. I’d done time with Gigi—keeping something solid between you and him is always a good play.

“Didn’t expect you,” Gigi said. “Never saw you before.”

I shrugged, wasting fewer words than he had.

“I did time with your boss. Thought he’d be sending Herk to watch my back.”

I shrugged again. “Herk” was short for “Hercules,” named for his hyper-muscled physique. Everyone but Gigi called him “Big Herk,” but Herk’s 275 pounds of prison-sculptured, Dianabol-boosted frame made him a middleweight in Gigi’s league.

The man Gigi thought was my boss was me, the Burke he knew years ago. My face had changed—bullet wounds and trainee surgeons will do that for you—but the payphone that rang in the back of Mama’s restaurant still took my calls. And my voice was still the same . . . when I wanted it to be.

“He still in your crew, Herk?”

I gave him the look.

“What?” he said, insulted. “You think I’m a fucking cop? They wanted to wire me up, they’d have to use a motherfucking bale of the stuff.”

I shook my head.

“You’re a dummy? You can’t talk, that it? Look, pal, I can see you’re not Herk, but I sure as fuck know you ain’t Max, either.”

Gigi meant Max the Silent, a Tibetan combat dragon. Max can’t speak, but that’s not how he got his name.

“I’m not a dummy,” I said, softly. “But I know when to dummy up.”

“Not everyone does,” he said, a tinge of nostalgia in his guttural voice. “Things ain’t the same. These days, you got to pay a man to watch your back even when you get hired just to do a simple job like pounding on that mook. But with these punk kids taking over now, fucking bosses they are, you never know when they’re gonna watch too much TV, start thinking all plots and shit.”

“Those two guys, you don’t think they were his?”

“Mario’s? The guy in the pretty white coat? Yeah, they were his, all right. Even a fucking stugotz like him knows when he’s been put on the spot, marked down for some serious pain. But he’s still got to do business, got to make his rounds, show some face. It was just a matter of time. Wasn’t me, it would have been someone else.

“Besides, if those guys you took out were from the . . . people who hired me, they would have been shooters. Those guys, they were just dumbass muscle.”

I nodded agreement. If they’d been experienced bodyguards, one look at Gigi would have had them heading for the back exit. Probably a pair of strip-club bouncers, used to flexing their gym muscles at drunks.

“Mario could’ve got himself some shooters, but he’d have to go to the yoms, get someone to do that for the kind of chump-change money he’s holding now. Can you imagine a nigger walking into that place? It’d be like one of them wandering onto our range, Inside.”

I shook my head.

“You know what, pal? This is seriously fucked. I get paid to do some work on a guy, I got to pay a piece of that just to make sure my back don’t get cold. Turns out, I wasted the money.”

“You could have handled both of those guys, too?” I said, pretending mild surprise. I’d seen Gigi waddle up to whole groups of men Inside, then go through them like an enraged kid busting up balsa-wood model airplanes. He had all the speed of a fire hydrant, and about the same pain tolerance. Gigi wasn’t any good at chasing you down, but that’s the thing about prison . . . nowhere to run.

“Ask your boss,” the battleship said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Hey, fuck you, you don’t want to talk. Here’s the other half of your money. Tell Burke I still owe him a glass of vino.”

Going back home to New York is like going back to an old girlfriend just because you remembered how great the sex had been. The minute you come, you remember all the reasons you’d decided to go the last time.

It wasn’t that bad, not really. Being away from my family had hurt more than I’d ever imagined, but I had them back again. All the ones left, anyway.

I didn’t have my old place, but the new one was better, once you got past the first couple of floors. I didn’t have my dog, but I could go for days without thinking about her now.

What I didn’t have was my old ways.

I couldn’t go back to scamming-and-stinging. I had always specialized in fleecing the kind of humans who couldn’t run to the Law, but the Internet boys had the freak market sewn up now. Promising kiddie porn I was never going to deliver was one of my bill-payers back in the day, but that’s all done—Cyberville’s full of places where freaks can sample the product for free before they buy.

Selling info on how to become a mercenary is another dry well. Worked fine back when “mercenary” meant government-funded, no-risk slaughter—machine guns against machetes, that kind of thing. Every master-race moron with heavy experience killing paper targets wanted to get in on the fun. That’s a different game today, too. The real merc work is in overthrowing governments, and that takes specialists with track records, not fantasy-fueled freaks whose fetal alcoholism convinced them that they were the last hope of the White Race.

I used to middleman arms deals, selling ordnance to . . . whoever. But that’s a no-touch ever since 9/11. The buyers could be Saud...

From AudioFile

This would make an excellent short story--too bad its a full novel. David Joe Wirth reads with gritted teeth as befits the story of tough-guy Burke, who moves in a world of tough guys. Even the dogs are tough. And theres no relief in this relentless book. Wirth never lets listeners forget the underlying pain. The story of a terminally ill con looking for a final score could be told quickly, but half the book is filler. Vachss shifts time and place without warning. Tangents go nowhere and confuse a complex plot. Fans will recognize Vachsss obsession with exposing crimes against children. But the crimes are so graphically detailed that youll need a shower and a stiff drink after listening. M.S. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000W917RE
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Crime/Black Lizard; 1st edition (December 2, 2008)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 2, 2008
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 333 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 258 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #650,304 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,579 in Hard-Boiled Mysteries (Kindle Store)
- #3,017 in Assassination Thrillers (Books)
- #4,870 in Private Investigator Mysteries (Kindle Store)

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4.4 135 ratings

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Andrew Vachss

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Andrew Vachss has been a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, a social-services caseworker, a labor organizer, and has directed a maximum-security prison for "aggressive-violent" youth. Now a lawyer in private practice, he represents children and youth exclusively, and is a founding member of the Legislative Drafting Institute for Child Protection. 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, essays, and a "children's book for adults." He is most currently engaged in the work of the Legislative Drafting Institute for Child Protection (ldicp.org). His books have been translated into twenty languages, and his work has appeared in Parade, Antaeus, Esquire, Playboy, The New York Times, and many other forums. His books have been awarded the Grand Prix de Littérature Policiére, the Falcon Award, Deutschen Krimi Preis, Die Jury des Bochumer Krimi Archivs and the Raymond Chandler Award (per Giurìa a Noir in Festival, Courmayeur, Italy). Andrew Vachss' latest books are Mortal Lock (Vintage, May 2013), SignWave (Pantheon, June 2015), and Carbon (Haverhill House, 2019). The dedicated Web site for Vachss and his work is vachss.com.

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Wayne C. Rogers

The best "Burke" novel in fifteen years!!!

Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2008

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As I've written in previous reviews of the "Burke" novels by Andrew Vachss, I consider the first five books to be the best in the series and perhaps the finest and darkest crime fiction ever written. The later novels, however, changed drastically in scope and tone, often dragging and boring me to the point where I'd fall asleep in the middle of the story, unless there was mention of Wesley (a killer so skilled and deadly that even the government was afraid of him) and the possibility of him coming back from the dead. It's only because of the sheer quality of the earlier "Burke" novels that I've stayed with the series up to the present, hoping that Vachss would eventually return to his earlier roots and delve more deeply into the darkness of Burke's sordid world. I'm happy (actually, I'm jumping up and down and doing cartwheels) to say that the author has finally done it with his newest novel, Terminal. After ten previous books, which left me somewhat disappointed and hoping for more, I wasn't expecting a lot from this novel. Still, I had hope, and as we all know hope is a good thing, perhaps the best of things. Well, after a few pages of reading, I suddenly found myself hooked line and sinker. I couldn't put the book down, and I became overwhelmed with the same emotions of excitement and eagerness that I'd first experienced when reading Flood, Blue Belle, Hard Candy, Strega, Blossom, and Sacrifice so many years ago. This was the old Burke that I remembered, along with his chosen family in crime (Max the Silent, the Professor, Michelle, the Mole, Momma, plus Terry and Clarence) ready to take on the child predators and to bring them down in the only way Burke knows how--with extreme prejudice!

The plot of Terminal centers on a long-ago crime in which three male teenagers from wealthy families raped, tortured, and murdered a thirteen-year-old girl for the sheer fun of it. Only one other person knew that the boys had committed the crime, a dope dealer, and he'd used it to his full advantage for over thirty years, hitting the three men up for small amounts of money at different times as they eventually grew into adults and became multi-millionaires in their own right. A white supremacist who knew Burke when he was in prison comes to him with a plan of extortion in which the dope dealer, who's still alive, will help them achieve one big score by taking three million dollars from the murderers and then getting revenge for the dead girl. All of Burke's family is going to be needed for this job as they set the deal in motion and then encounter trained assassins and ex-government agents hired to kill them. Burke will have to depend on his instincts and skills to keep himself and his family alive and to finally carry out his goals of death and destruction. There's going to be a high body count before everything reaches its final conclusion.

This is a story that takes a closer look at Burke's earlier years in prison and how he managed to stay alive with the Professor's help, the white supremacist groups that are there and how they originated and what's expected of its members once they get out of jail, the return of Max the Silent (the deadliest martial artist alive) and his fight with a Thai killer sent to murder Burke, the Mole and his connection to the Israeli secret service and how they use Burke to kill a man, who also happens to be a child molester, in exchange for their help with this score, and finally how our anti-hero sets up and then takes down through insurmountable odds the men who murdered a thirteen-year-old girl so many years ago.

This is Andrew Vachss reaching into the darkness of humanity's soul to tell a story that's but the tip of the iceberg to what goes on in today's society. This is certainly mankind at its cruelest and most violent state and how the lead character in Terminal achieves some measure of justice for those unable to defend themselves.

The Terminal is definitely Vachss at his best. This is why I've stayed with the series so long, praying that the author would once again write a novel that would blow me away with its intensity and violent demeanor. The author certainly knows what he's talking about and clearly understands the underbelly of society's dark side. This is a man who's a lawyer in real life and battles for the rights of children who have no one else to stand up for them. In many ways, Andrew Vachss is Burke, a shadow warrior who'll stop at nothing to protect the young and innocent. Highly recommended!!!

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M. Kinney

One of the best Burke books ever.

Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2007

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I have read all of the Burke books by Andrew Vachss and although I liked each one of them a great deal, some are standouts to me. Terminal is one of those standouts. Mr. Vachss does something that few writers of series fiction seem to be able to do well, and that is age his core characters. Everyone is getting older and the way they do things is changing. Burke is now looking at the opportunities to make money with much more scrutiny because at his age, going to jail is not an option. The book has an interesting plot and a few sharp subplots that make it a very interesting and enjoyable read. I would recommend it highly.

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Mel Odom

Burke Is Back On The Mean Streets

Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2007

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Andrew Vachss is one of my favorite tough-guy novelists. Generally, no one writes them meaner or leaner than Vachss. He's got the inside track on a lot of sex crimes, particularly pedophilia and child-rape, which are special topics to him.

When he's not writing bestselling fiction about these two potentially stomach-turning subjects, he's practicing law to save kids from these predators and put those predators away for ever. In some ways, in real life Vachss is an even larger hero than his iconic hijacker/gunman/profiler, Burke.

Vachss has been writing these novels since FLOOD was published in 1985, and I've been reading them since I found the paperback in 1986. TERMINAL, this year's release, is the 17th in the series.

I love Burke. He's a hardened criminal with no remorse in him for people he takes advantage of. He usually operates cons, selling information that's no good or forgeries to people who intend to use it for evil pursuits. Burke justifies it, and I've always bought into his justification, though I wouldn't do it myself. He was raised and mistreated by the State, in institutions as well as foster homes. He never had a chance and he knows it. He still doesn't have one. So he lives his life in the shadows, and that provides a vicarious thrill that I haven't gotten over even twenty-plus years later.

He's also got a "family" of other people who were just as broken as he was, yet who refused to roll over and die. There's Max the Silent, a deaf and dumb Mongolian martial arts master who is immediate death to anyone that he's decided must die. The Prof is the black con man who taught Burke how to survive in prison, then on the streets. The Mole is a Jewish techno-wizard, a savant with anything electrical or explosive. Michelle is the ex-streetwalker transvestite who was surgically altered when she got the money together and serves as their social engineer. Wesley was the pistoleer of the group, and no one was more deadly with a firearm. Mama is the Chinese restaurant owner who's always served as their bank and a place of operations.

Over the years, Burke and Vachss - and the readers - have added to that family. And, sadly, they've taken away.

With the publication of TERMINAL, Vachss has pushed his series into near-inaccessibility by new readers. The world Burke inhabits has just grown and gotten so large that newbies need a scorecard to keep up. Vachss tries to alleviate that problems with a lot of explaining and backtracking, but that effort gets in the way of long-time readers. I understand the characters and the world. I wanted the action to move a little faster in this book. I still enjoyed it a lot, but a lot of it was like having a good friend rework stories you've heard before. Still, I like the stories, so it's not so bad.

However, the plot was a little late in launching and I became impatient at times. Vachss is still fun to read, though. But I'd really suggest reading the early ones first and doing some catch-up before tackling this one. That way you know who Clarence and Terry and Flower are.

In this book, Burke goes back to stalking the child molesters and killers in the shadows. Three men are guilty of raping and killing a girl over twenty years ago. One of their accomplices has come forward with a blackmail scheme. The sons of privileged families, they've all ascended into wealthy lifestyles.

Burke intends to blackmail them for the murder, make them pay financially, then with their lives. It's what he does, and I'm one of his biggest fans.

The book takes a while to wind up to full speed, but it's always a pleasure working the capers and the con with Burke. Vachss pulls you right into the middle of the action and explains how those operations work better than anyone else I've ever read. And he doesn't flinch over the hard stuff like murder and torture either. He lays it out on the line. These books often aren't for people with weak stomachs.

In addition to the Burke books, Vachss has also written standalones and graphic novels and comics. I really recommend his novels SHELLA and THE GETAWAY MAN to showcase some of his other writing.

Vachss is seriously THE crime writer you should be reading if you're not.

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Bernt H. Lingaas

Book as described, but slow delivery

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 1, 2024

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OK

Dylan Thomas Porter

Excellent.

Reviewed in Canada on March 5, 2021

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Great condition. Came in right on time like always.

falk gwiosda

sehr gut

Reviewed in Germany on April 21, 2022

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sehr gut ..

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hallamshire1

love Andrew Vachss novels .

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 18, 2013

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very much enjoyed this novel . Daresay Andrew Vachss is an acquired taste but I enjoy his novels very much , particularly the Burke series.

KD

boring

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 25, 2009

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Andrew Vachss' novels used to be exiting, and enjoyable too. Not any more though. I thought I'd come back to the "Burke" books, after not reading any for a few years. I wish I hadn't bothered. I realise Vachss is a "single issue" kind of guy, but how long have we been hearing the same voice, saying the same thing, now? If only he'd tried to stretch himself a bit more as a writer. Who knows how far he could have gone? Who knows how far Burke could have gone? I bought this on mp3 but couldn't even finish it.

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Terminal: A Burke Novel (Burke Series Book 17) Kindle Edition

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