[In the following review, Brashler provides a brief summary of Blue Belle.]

A sleuth who lives not just on society's edge, but on its underbelly. An Amazon of a heroine whose thoughts never assume the proportions of her body. A city full of mercenaries, psychopaths and deviates. An unsmiling author with an open collar and an eye patch.

Such is Blue Belle, the third episode in the sullen existence of Burke, the outlaw private eye created by Andrew Vachss. It is a book so ferocious, with characters so venal and action so breakneck, that you dare not get in the way.

Burke, just Burke, is an ex-con, no-b.s. operative who pretty much detests the small stuff of life. Things such as taxes, Social Security numbers, driver's licenses and bills. He avoids most of them and doesn't even own a telephone—you want him, you call Mama Wong's Chinese restaurant and Burke just might call back.

His friends are similarly shadowy. Max is a martial arts expert. Mole is a mechanic who can rig any device. Prof is a hustler. Michele is a pre-op transsexual. Pansy, Burke's dog, is a lethal mastiff who lays down when Burke says, "Jump."

Life is this way, the premise holds, in order for Burke to get things done. He only takes on a gumshoe job, however, for big money, which he then spreads among his friends, or to avenge situations he finds repulsive, such as cases involving child abuse. In Blue Belle he is commissioned by a Manhattan pimp to get rid of the "Ghost Van," a nasty RV whose occupants kidnap and murder teenage prostitutes.

All of this is strong, gritty, gut-bucket stuff, so unsparing and vivid that it makes you wince. Vachss knows the turf and writes with a sneering bravado. In Burke's world guys have "cement mixer eyes," and "everybody's lying but you and me." Burke prowls the city with a seething, angry, almost psychotic voice appropriate to the devils he deals with.

But hold on. Just when you think you have come up with a companion to your Elmore Leonard collection, Burke meets Belle. And Belle is a disaster. She is a backwoods behemoth—there are enough descriptions of her chest and hind quarters to fill a butcher's manual—with more excess emotional baggage than Sybil. Worst of all, Belle complains, nags, clings and whines incessantly.

In so doing, she turns Burke, who, we must charitably assume, is addled by her gravity-defying body, into a dimestore shrink. In scene after scene he is a tedious, know-it-all with a pat answer for Belle's every psychological glitch, misgiving and whine. Beneath his two-day stubble and street-smarts, Burke becomes a Dr. Joyce Brothers in conversations that end with, "Tears spilled down her face."

Finally the ghost van beckons, and Burke gets back on the case. With Belle not central to the operation, every nasty, frightening element falls into place, and nothing disappoints.

Vachss is good, his Burke books first-rate. Find a new date, Belle.