[In the following review. Dirda provides a brief overview of Flood.]

Andrew H. Vachss has written quite an extraordinary thriller in Flood. Imagine a New York where the streets are worse than mean, they're positively depraved. The hero Burke is a private detective (sort of) with an engineer's approach to survival. He lives with a huge mongrel named Pansy in an apartment fortified like a bank vault; he drives a $40,000 Plymouth loaded with more gadgetry than James Bond's Aston Martin. His friends include a transvestite prostitute, a mute Tibetan fighting machine named Max, a panhandler called the Prof (short for Professor or Prophet, no one's sure which), an electronic wizard who lives underground beneath a pile of junked cars, and a doctor who doubles as the secret leader of an Hispanic revolutionary group.

In his first case, Burke takes on a client named Flood, a martial arts expert, searching for the man who raped and killed a little girl. Together they make quite a team, something like Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin in a novel by Celine. For this is a very violent book, and Vachss never flinches from the horror: he includes a sickening description of a snuff movie, chilling (yet comic) portraits of would-be soldiers of fortune, and a convincing look at the underworld of child pornography. Indeed, he veers close to the didactic in some of his rants about the slime who prey on little kids—but who can blame him? Vachss himself is an expert on child abuse and juvenile delinquency. His is not a pretty world, and he has no use for conventional pieties to excuse atrocity.

Virtually every survivalist fantasy of urban life finds its place here—Burke the vigilante, with his superhero comrades; the city as concrete jungle; civilization constantly assaulted by fiends in human form. Vachss' language is wry, Chandleresque, and laced with authentic details about the methodology and gadgetry of crime.

"I sell a lot of identification, mostly to clowns who want the option to disappear but never will. The stuff looks pretty good—all you need are some genuine state blanks, like for drivers' licenses, and the right typewriter. IBM makes a special typing element…. They call it an OCR element and you can't buy it over the counter but this is something less than a significant deterrent to people who steal for a living. I have a complete set in the office."

Flood's only fault—assuming, of course, one is not dismayed by its draconian social views—may be its length: it sacrifices a tight artistry for a rambling panorama of damned souls. In the end, though, Burke does find the child-killer, and Flood fights for her life in ritual combat.