[In the following review, Dretzka provides a brief summary of Hard Candy and praises Vachss for his exploration into the darker side of human nature.]

Andrew Vachss' crime novels—all of which feature Burke, an unlicensed Manhattan P.I. and scam artist who doubles as an avenging angel—are as unsettling a collection of books as one is likely to find.

His novels, as cleverly scripted as any currently in the genre, are less about solving crimes than they are about forcing readers to come to grips with the cvil around them. Like Jim Thompson in such works as The Killer Inside Me, Vachss puts that evil under a microscope, revealing aspects of the human character that most of us gladly choose to ignore.

Using their brains more often than their brawn, Burke and his motley band of urban guerrillas do battle against the most vile kind of sociopaths: child abusers, rapists and pedophiles. When perpetrators ignore pointed warnings, Burke's, "crew" administers the brand of street justice to which one is compelled only when a close friend, a relative or a young child is violated. We applaud from our easy chairs, but not without experiencing a palpable degree of queasiness.

In Flood, Strega and Blue Belle, Vachss turned the crime genre upside down by portraying his P.I. not as a modernday cowboy hero or hardboiled Knight of the Round Table but as a paranoid, and increasingly morose, vigilante. Burke is a crafty ex-con, and his turf is the dark underbelly of Manhattan. His "street family" army consists of a deaf-mute Mongolian warrior, a jive-talking black street hustler, a transsexual prostitute, a mole-like electronics genius, a teenager rescued from a life of sexual abuse, and a monstrous dog. His enemies, usually martial-arts experts, possess superhuman skills.

Vachss' fans will find in Hard Candy a tight summation of the emotional tension that has built within Burke like a volcano through the earlier books, then an explosively cathartic resolution. It begins with a particularly troubling example of frontier justice—a settling of scores left over from Blue Belle—when Burke confronts the fear and anxiety that have paralyzed him since the shootout that unnecessarily claimed his lover in that book.

"Down here, we have rules," Burke says, explaining his call to action. "We made them ourselves. Feeling dead inside me—that was a feeling. It wouldn't bring Belle back to me—wouldn't get me closer. But making somebody dead … that was a debt."

He subsequently is hired by Candy, a kinky call-girl and acquaintance from his twisted childhood, to rescue her daughter from a cult leader called Train. Simple enough, but he manages at the same time to cross paths with a spooky freelance assassin named Wesley—another blast from Burke's past—who thinks that Burke is cutting into his business. And, for their part, certain NYPD detectives are none too pleased that he double crossed them in a Times Square sting operation in Blue Belle.

Through Candy and Wesley, Vachss exposes many of Burke's early roots and sets him on a course that either will rid New York of some of its most camivorous perverts, mobsters and religious charlatans or put him in a straitjacket. Harkening back to earlier books, the author calls in Burke's haunting, red-haired nemesis, Strega, and the memory of his beloved Flood, now in faraway Japan.

Because of all this emotional and textual baggage, Hard Candy might be a difficult spot for newcomers to jump into Vachss' repertoire. The series, with its many continuing characters and themes, should be read in order; and so many loose ends are tied together in Hard Candy that it might be tough to appreciate Burke's motivations without having already read Blue Belle, at least.

Vachss, an attorney specializing in child-abuse cases, has placed on Burke's shoulders the weight of America's frustrations over courtroom failures, its collective desire for retribution and the weakness of its people in the face of true evil. But the solutions to society's greatest ills aren't simple, and it's obvious in Hard Candy that Burke doesn't always make the right decisions and that knowing this is throwing him off-balance.

"Driving home [from an encounter with Strega], my black and white eyes were still working, but the images were reversed. Inside out. Inverted. For me, playing it safe wasn't playing—it was my life. I couldn't find the controls—nothing was where it had been. Terror said it was my partner, but I didn't have my old pal Fear to keep the nerve endings sharp…. Liars gave me their word, sociopaths gave me their trust."

Burke isn't for everyone—certainly the horrible violence, explicit sex and unspeakably ugly crimes of his books won't appeal to those who read mysteries each night to ease their journey into Dreamland—but he fills a void in a cluttered, too often unchallenging genre. With his soiled white hat, this Lone Ranger of the '90s asks difficult questions of readers, while also shining light into the darkest recesses of their souls. It wouldn't hurt for more people to pay attention.