"Lord of the asphalt jungle."
—Washington Post
FLOOD
A Burke Novel
"Flood is a white-knuckle read, a redeye flight to hell." —Roderick Thorp, author of The Detective
|
 Mystery | Vintage Crime | Trade Paperback | Jan 2001 | $12.00 | Andrew Vachss Here is a shattering new novel, introducing a brand new exciting talent. The milieu is the urban underside where sex at its gaudiest and most perverse is bought and sold—a kind of American analogue to Gorky's Lower Depths. Freelance investigator Burke (his true specialty is survival) like his creator knows this world intimately. And now he must go further and deeper into it than ever before to help a remarkable woman named Flood find and take vengeance on the man who raped and murdered her best friend's child. Flood is a novel that, even as it shocks, manages a counterpoint of charm and profound sense of decent outrage. And it introduces two wonderful, irrepressible characters of whom more will be heard. |
Acclaim for Andrew Vachss
| "Flood is going to evoke comparisons with Hammet and Chandler, and it will deserve to. But it has humor and humanity all its own—the title character is a woman who loves and kills with equal skill—and its lower-depths big-city ambience is as authentic as the lawyer/author who makes it his own." —Nick Pileggi |
"Andrew Vachss knows the turf, and obviously he knows about literature—a helluva first novel." —Dan Jenkins |
| "Vachss' tough-guy writing style grabs you by the hair and jerks you to attention...Among the literary surprises of the season." —Detroit Free Press |
"The author has been there, into the dark, steaming streets where the real things happen. Its pace, it dagger-sharp understanding, its moral outrage over the ugliest kinds of criminality and its brilliant and faulted hero make it a classic kind of thriller." —Les Whitten |
"Hard-Boiled fiction at its best" —Chicago Tribune Book World |
 ISBN 0-917657-43-8 | 1985 Donald I. Fine hard cover ed |
 ISBN 0-671-61905-5 | Jul 1986 Pocket edition |
 ISBN 0-679-78129-3 | April 1998 Vintage Crime edition |
| Burke—he belongs to the city. He dares to prowl the meanest streets in the lawless urban underground. He's a freelance private investigator—but his real specialty is survival.
Flood—She's a hard-knocks lady, who grew up rough. A master in the martial arts, she loves and kills with equal skill. They'll surprise you, thrill you, move you and burn in your minds forever. 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 excecutioner. She wants Burke to find a monster for her—so she can kill him with her bare hands. In this cauterizing thriller, Andrew Vachss' renegade private eye 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. |
| "An extraordinary thriller...Vachss never flinches from the horror." —Washington Post Book World |
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