[In the following review, Lukowsky calls Born Bad a "compelling view of the psychotic personality," but argues that in Down in the Zero, Vachss has abandoned "all pretense of character development."]

Vachss, an attorney specializing in juvenile justice and child abuse, is the author of a series of very successful crime novels, most starring the unconventional detective Burke. His fiction, including this story collection and a new Burke novel, explores the recurring themes of his nonliterary professional life—incest, child abuse, violence to women—but does so from a distinctly nonestablishment, belly-of-the-beast perspective.

Born Bad comprises 44 short pieces—including a three-act play—that look inside the heads of a collection of serial killers, child abusers, and other violent criminals. Vachss' indignation is both his strength and his weakness. His zeal provides the power behind his largely unadorned prose, creating unrelenting pressure but ultimately threatening to jade readers. Still, these snapshots offer a compelling view of the psychotic personality. One story—a vignette, actually—consists of the eerily apologetic monologue a serial killer delivers to his victim; another offers a killer explaining why environment was not the cause of his aberration. By the time one encounters the tenth psycho killer, though, they all begin to sound the same.

In Down in the Zero, Burke, the dark, brooding street angel and avenger of children and exploited women, is critically depressed if not suicidal. On his last case, he was forced to kill a child, and the grief is eating him alive. When Randy, a youth from the wealthy suburbs and son of an old Burke flame, asks for help, Burke hesitates. It is only when Burke learns Randy's peers are committing suicide that he intervenes. The usual Burke potpourri of sexual perversion, incest, greed, and child abuse results. There are a few new spins: this time the evil emanates not from sleazy crime barons but from an ostensibly legitimate business, and the suburban locale provides Burke a forum to critique modern shopping-mall youth, which he does with gusto. Finally, though, it's still the same old Burke. He's a one-trick pony, a revenge machine who has no faith in the system and usually commits a criminal act to bring the bad guys down. Is Vachss using Burke to work out his own frustrations as a lawyer who must work within the system? Maybe so, but the demon-purging process is taking its toll. The Burke series once seemed innovative and utterly original. Now, with all pretense of character development abandoned, it's tough to distinguish one Burke novel from another.