[In the following review, Baker criticizes Vachss for presenting his characters in a "heavy-handed" manner.]

"The first time I killed someone, I was scared", confesses the narrator of Andrew Vachss's Shella. "Shella told me it was like that for her the first time she had sex. I was fifteen that first time. Shella was nine." The equation of sex and violence in this opening passage is to govern the book.

Our narrator is a contract killer who is nameless even to his girlfriends, although some people call him "Ghost". Ghost shacks up with a stripper who has the generic nom de porn of Candy, but her self-chosen name is Shella, suggesting a carapace: "Some social worker in one of the shelters told her she had to come out of her shell." Ghost and Shella make a living at "Badger", where she picks up marks and Ghost robs them. After killing one person too many, Ghost does time in prison, and when he comes out he starts searching for the vanished Shella.

He falls in with a group of American Indian criminals who want to assassinate a neo-Nazi leader. He infiltrates the Nazis, and it says something about the novel that the most sympathetic characters in it are to be found among these caricature white-trash losers. After Ghost kills the Nazi, the honest Indians keep their side of the bargain by tracing Shella. She has been working as a dominatrix, and the book's picturesque excursions into formal sadomasochism are only the logical extension of its first premisses. Shella has been going too far and murdering her clients, in a belated revenge on her father who sexually abused her. She has also, for reasons best known to Andrew Vachss, been drinking their blood, and it is this which has led to her slow death from AIDS. Ghost's final favour is as predictable as its simile; her neck snaps "like a dry twig".

Shella slips by in bite-sized chunks, the product of a culture with a short attention span. It is an exercise in style and ambience, in almost parodic masculine hardness ("Cancer don't look tough either", one character warns another about Ghost), against a background of deeply trawled contemporary sleaze. Underlying it is Vachss's picture of the effect of American prisons and juvenile detention centres, psychopath factories, where gang rape is routine (and consequently becoming commonplace in "new emetic" American crime fiction): Ghost began his lethal career by pulping the head of a sleeping rapist with a radio battery swung in a sock.

Vachss's presentation of damaged and ruined identities—people whose minds are "all scar tissue", as Ghost's is said to be—can be heavy-handed, and the emotional inarticulacy of his characters sometimes approaches the posturing pseudo-poetry of Bruce Springsteen lyrics. The book is narrated in three sections; clubs, diamonds and spades. There are no hearts in it. Like so much else in the book, the stylization and veiled sentimentality with which this point is made recalls the aesthetics of the tattoo parlour.