[In the following review, Womack criticizes Vachss's work, likening Footsteps of the Hawk to drinking "near-beer," and faulting Batman: The Ultimate Evil for its comic-book style conventions.]

Andrew Vachss has good intentions, surely. For years he has devoted himself to the defense of children against adults who would wreak physical and sexual harm upon them. In his fiction, Vachss's men and women—solitary, suspicious, stoic—tend to bear the scars of such abuse. Depicting the convoluted ways in which their childhood traumas haunt them in adult life often enables him to introduce into his plots an emotional resonance otherwise undeserved. Often; not always.

In Footsteps of the Hawk, Burke, Vachss's ex-con protagonist from his earlier Down in the Zero, finds himself squeezed by two New York cops as he tries to ascertain which one is a serial killer. Is it short-fused, ball-bearing-eyed Morales? "A thick, violent vein pulsed in his neck." Is it marble-thighed, pouty-voiced Belinda? Watching her climb stairs, Burke finds it "hard not to admire those fine flesh-gears meshing." He knows one thing: "I was a blind leech in muddy swampwater, searching for a pulse."

In the past, Burke has suffered familial abuse and long-term stints in state facilities, but his allusions to these events are so perfunctory that he might be recalling someone else's recovered memories. Still, with impeccable timing, his reveries arise whenever the plot takes especially recherche twists. Burke doesn't much like his city ("New York may be a woman, the way some writers say. If she is, she's a low-class evil bitch"), yet he is keenly perceptive of her raffish byways, where "feral dogs fear the feral children, and even the STOP signs are bullet-pocked." He mimes the role of Chandlerian mean-street moralist with approximate panache: "Time and people passed, at about the same speed. I know about that—in my life, I've killed some of both. I learned something too—killing time is harder."

Vachss burdens Burke with roguish associates. There's Mama, whose Chinatown restaurant is the hub of a vast, shadowy operation whose miscreants manage to serve Burke's most petty needs; Max, his "warrior," i.e., goon; Fortunato, a mob lawyer who clips his cigars with a small silver guillotine; tawny-thighed hooker Mojo Mary, "half-Cajun, half-Lao;" and an entourage of Tyson-sized palookas, one of whom, regrettably, speaks in rhyme: "It don't take no rocket scientist to be a ho', bro—all you need is the lips and the hips." Burke also owns a Neapolitan mastiff named Pansy. He shouldn't.

If Vachss never approaches James Ellroy in portraying a palpably evil or even believable world, rarely does he flounder into Mickey Spillane terrain—more's the pity. But savor such delights as "'Liar!' she hissed" when you find them, and as for the episode of Burke being strapped naked into an electric chair while—no, see for yourself. For those who crave that bitter aftertaste, the frothy head on Footstep's near-beer should momentarily slake their thirst.

Onward, downward. The inherent difficulty with transferring a popular-culture hero of an earlier era (e.g., Tarzan, James Bond) into the context of the contemporary world is that the retrofitted hero invariably becomes more two-dimensional. It pleases us to see Sherlock Holmes apply deductive reasoning sitting in a hansom cab on Baker Street; seeing him similarly ratiocinating, standing atop the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza, evokes a different response. Believably recreating, in writing, a hero taken from a predominantly visual medium is even harder. Few writers try. In Batman: The Ultimate Evil, Vachss tries. Appended to the end of the novel is a heartbreaking article detailing the scope of child exploitation in Southeast Asia, notably Thailand. It's not fiction. Gotham, we have a problem.

The fondly remembered Caped Crusader no longer tilts at the likes of Guest Windmill Tallulah Bankhead to the accompaniment of "Wam-O!" and "Splurp!" In keeping with the Zeitgeist, he has of late been transmogrified into the moody, broody, gloom-'n'-doomy Night-Rider, as Vachss tags him (thankfully, no subtle homage to earlier masked avengers seems intended). But in Vachss's mitts, noir becomes bete noire, and Batman battles pedophiles.

The reader is initially lulled into hoping the hazards ahead will not be so unfamiliar, as our hero busies himself of an evening snapping thuggish arms "like twigs," moving at the speed of "a turbo-charged mongoose" and listening contentedly to that "crackle-crunch sound that always foretells a fractured skull." The Batmobile is described lovingly, yet gnomically, as if a Motor Trend reviewer had been translated into Slovakian by someone more familiar with Czech. Its wheels, we are told, are guided by "massive iridium screws," probably in the manner of dilithium crystals. The Night-Rider may uphold the laws of Gotham City, but he remains blissfully oblivious to those of inertia, momentum, gravity.

In mufti, Batman encounters orange-eyed Debra Kane, a child protection services case-worker. ("'An albino woman,' Bruce Wayne thought. 'And a proud one too.'") As he isn't much of a raconteur and his unadorned face is no more than "a fleshy mask of blandness," when Kane meets Wayne she is forced to break the ice by telling him about child abuse; he's shocked. They go to a housing project, the sight of which nearly does him in. The reader slowly comprehends why Gotham's crime rate never seems to go down.

Then, having spent half the book striving to situate Batman in a city so reminiscent of New York that one seedy quarter is called, by happenstance, "The Bowery," Vachss proceeds in the second half to loose his Night-Rider upon a Satanic child-procuring cabal in—the projects? Thailand? No, in the land of "Udon Khai," where the leading industry is providing well-heeled tourists with sex with children aboard a ship called, truly, the Lollypop.

Be charitable—try. Imagine Vachss on the afternoon he wrote this book. Two-thirty: time to send Batman to Thailand. My God … no. His flesh-gears mesh uncontrollably as, horrified, he suddenly perceives the problem he has thus far managed to ignore: The broad shoulders of the Night-Rider will snap like twigs beneath the weight of this particular reality. What to do? That's it …

So, quickly: En route to Udon Khai, Batman encounters Evil in all its forms—a "portly man dressed in a white suit," possibly Sydney Greenstreet; a "muscular woman in a black Mohawk" who walks a snow leopard on a leash; cabal kingpin William X. Malady, who keeps his left hand close to "a giant globe on which a map of the world had been painted"; and countless Uzi-blasting extras shipped over as a job lot from a soft-porn version of "Terry and the Pirates." Good wins. Bad loses.

Batman: The Ultimate Evil is as satisfying—aesthetically, ethically, morally—as a pulse-pounding yarn in which pulpfiction hero Doc Savage ransacks the shantytowns of South America in a terribly successful search for Doc Mengele.