[In the following review, Anshaw claims that Vachss's work makes her "morally queasy" and criticizes the "feel-good roll of hate" created by the atmosphere of his novels.]

By the traditions of fiction, the private eye is the conscience of the underside. No choirboy himself, his weariness of evil and its doers comes from close acquaintance. He stands in the same shadows they do, just a bit off to the side, staking out his sorry corner of society from behind a glowing cigarette ember.

A problem for modern writers is dragging this anti-hero into a present where evil no longer stays put in a bad neighborhood, no longer plays itself out within a circumscribed society of crooks and hoods and dolls who drink each other's rye (neat), frequent each other's gambling backrooms and plug each other with .38s. Today, crime can be a quick climb through a left-open window of opportunity, a not entirely unreasonable career choice for those extremely low on options. Anybody can turn out to be a player.

Andrew Vachss' way of updating the gumshoe to fit current crimestyles is to drop the figure's dispassionate pose and turn him from society's conscience into its avenger. The result is both dead-earnest and often inadvertently hilarious. In his worst patches, such as the following urban ode, Vachss sounds like the winner of a literary parody contest:

"Gut-grinding poverty. Sandpaper for the soul. Pigeons overhead, circling in flocks. Hawks on the ground. Make enough wrong turns and you're on a no-way street."

The going gets even rougher when Vachss' protagonist—the ex-con detective Burke—begins rhapsodizing on his favorite subject, himself:

"A legless man pulled himself along the floor of the train, his hands covered with tattered mittens. The upper half of his body sat on a flat wooden disc, separated from the cart by a foot-high column. So you could see he wasn't faking it. He rattled the change in his cup, not saying a word. Humans buried their faces in newspapers, I tapped his shoulders as he rolled by. Stuffed a ten-dollar bill in his cup. He pulled it out, looked it over. Locked my eyes.

"'Thank you, my brother,' he said. Strong, clear voice.

"We always know each other, those of us with missing parts."

Burke's main missing part seems to be a sense of personal ironic detachment. He takes himself more seriously than even your average ultra-macho private eye. Although no one seems to be after him, Burke lives in a maximum-security apartment presided over by a killer attack-dog. Though he doesn't seem to get an undue number of calls, he has all his messages elaborately screened through the phone at Mama Wong's Chinese restaurant.

Basically a loner, he nonetheless clears a little space on the ground where he stands, so women can worship there. His basic attitude toward the female gender puts him somewhere in the company of Andrew Dice Clay. Burke's idea of a witty personals ad is: "Woman wanted. Disease-free. Self-lubricating. Short attention span."

Blossom is Burke's fifth appearance between covers. This time he leaves his Manhattan turf behind and heads for Merrillville, Ind., where an old jail-cell buddy has family troubles. His young cousin has been charged with a grim stack of serial killings—shootings of necking couples in parked cars. Burke quickly (operating on tough-guy instinct) decides the kid didn't do it. Who really did is sure to be some filthy sicko scum because these are the bad guys in society, as Vachss constructs it.

Burke (operating on tough-guy psychological acumen) figures this particular sicko's sickness is that he can't stand to see normal red-blooded guys and gals groping each other. Killing them is his way of having sex. Then (using tough-guy deductive reasoning) Burke figures out this means the killer must have been an abused child the court returned to his horrorshow family.

Not that this profound understanding of the criminal mind leads Burke to any wimp sympathy for it. When Blossom (the book's title character and typical female—diner waitress/doctor/wearer of stockings with garters) suggests the killer might be mentally ill, Burke says,

"It felt like I was being baited. Goaded into something.

"'You think he needs a psychiatrist?,' I asked her.

"'Don't you?'

"'No.'"

Burke has sterner measures in mind for this "filth," "freak," "greasy human," "thing," whom he tracks down through the roster of a rural neo-Nazi group.

When he's not writing, Vachss is a New York attorney specializing in juvenile justice and child abuse. Surely this has brought him up against the uglier side of humanity and probably accounts for the virulent hatred implicit in his fiction.

The Joel Steinbergs of the world bring vigilante blood to at least a simmer in most of us. But it's an impulse of unilateral judgment and one that civilization requires we resist. Vachss doesn't bother. Blossom gets on a feel-good roll of hate that doesn't brake for compassion.

Vachss draws his villains as right-wing paramilitary nutcases, making his story a perfect circle of violence and loathing. The good guys want to get rid of the filth and scum whose intent it is to get rid of the filth and scum. In a world like this the only difference in belief systems is one's definition of filth and one's choice of clean-up method.

That Vachss' books are popular scares me a little. I don't like thinking I'm the only reader made morally queasy inside his airless, closed loop.