[In the following review, Gehr criticizes Vachss for "redundancy, if not hypocrisy."]

Having now struck thrice, it's time for popular and once-promising crimester Andrew Vachss to be called out on grounds of redundancy, if not hypocrisy. In Blue Belle, the most recent in his series of novels featuring Burke, a stonehard sociopath, Vachss lazily follows the pattern familiar to readers of his Flood and Strega.

In all three books the titular women enlist this quintessential underground man to seek out and destroy various "freaks" involved in some form of child abuse. Burke gladly complies, using prison-yard instincts, con games, survivalist wiles, justified violence ("'Damn their souls to hell.' 'I don't do souls,'" Burke replies, "'Just bodies'"), and his ongoing retinue of post-Runyon cohorts. These include a goldenhearted former hooker saving up for a sex change, an inscrutable deaf-mute martial-arts expert, and a Puerto Rican liberation group. Along the way, he gets it on with the invariably strong-willed title character, and in Blue Belle, this is where my Vachss problem begins.

The novel opens with Burke earning a bundle at the expense of some Wall Street creeps while whining about lower Manhattan's new gentry, "who get preorgasmic when you whisper 'investment banking.'" He lives like a paranoid war criminal in a heavily fortified bunker along with a vicious yet lovable Neapolitan mastiff named Pansy—not all that different from the newcomers he despises. A loner among loners, he has a father complex on account of his institutional upbringing; Vachss reads savviest in scenes involving supercynical Burke with the police, attorneys, and family agencies.

This stems from Vachss's impeccable credentials as a lawyer in the fields of juvenile justice and child abuse (he still lectures and trains on the subject). His indignation at pedophiles, pimps, and pornographers is righteous as hell and has grown over the course of the books. Now Burke's personal torments seem secondary to the children's crusade he has undertaken ("I was going to be a scam artist. But I kept running into kids. And they keep pulling me into what I didn't want to be"). What's good for the world is bad for Vachss's fans; Burke's scams are much more intriguing than his social services. In Blue Belle, the "kids" are menaced by the Ghost Van, which appears out of nowhere to torment New York's underage girl hookers, who are either offed on the spot or sped to a Times Square porn palace to star in snuff films.

The dead pros may be white, but the perps are Hispanic: "Word is he uses blood the way some freaks use Vaseline…. The Spanish guy, he don't want nothing to do with nothing that ain't white. No Puerto Ricans, no Chinese … nothing that's out there but white meat." The total weirdness to be found in New York always seems to surprise the good guys, who repeatedly gasp things like, "Who does this … What kind of freaks?"

Yet the city's inherent freakiness appears to have rubbed off on Vachss/Burke. Belle, the novel's lust interest, is a strapping 29-year-old blond stripper endowed with inordinate t&a; she appears much younger, however, speaks in a "little-girl" voice, and is herself an incest child. The surly kiddie defender wastes no time falling for this big baby, whose predilections run toward spanking and buggery ("If I try to sit on your face again, you going to give me another smack?"). But since all good things must end for Burke, the former swamp sister falls in the line of duty. Vachss might consider giving Burke a rest, too. The line between virtue and vice is always problematic, and with Burke's secret proclivities now uncovered, he should probably be kept off the streets for a while.