Andrew Vachss has 12 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is A Bomb Built in Hell.
A Bomb Built in Hell
Summary
While doing extended time for killing a fellow prisoner, Wesley meets Carmine Trentoni in a New York state prison. Carmine's life sentence hasn't cut him off from his outside sources, and he sees great potential in Wesley to carry out his revenge. Wesley emerges from prison prepared to be the perfect hit man: calculating, deadly, and driven by money. On his release, Wesley follows Carmine's directions to locate a Mr. Petraglia. Pet and Wesley set up shop in Brooklyn, and execute their assignments with finesse - and occasionally, more explosives than are strictly called for. But Wesley isn't satisfied with his low-profile lot, and sets out to make a mark on the city that everyone will notice - which he does, in a shocking, dynamite conclusion.
©2012 Andrew Vachss (P)2012 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Urban Renewal
Summary
The man known only as Cross and his multi-skilled team of urban mercenaries are back, this time invading one of Chicago's least desirable neighborhoods in a land-grab that has the entire underworld puzzled. Chicago has no shortage of deadly gangs. They all know the Cross Crew occupies a cinderblock bunker called Red 71. The Crew is notorious for its deadly efficiency and its disinterest in anything but money. So why has it turned from seller to buyer, grabbing up houses on a block where only a few holdouts against urban decay remain? Both the cops and the underworld are watching closely...but are they the only ones?
©2014 Andrew Vachss (P)2014 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Blossom
Summary
In the figure of Burke, Andrew Vachss has given contemporary crime fiction one of its most mesmerizing characters. An abused child raised in orphanages, foster homes, and prisons, Burke is a career criminal and outlaw who steals and scams for a living. But he draws the line at the psychopaths and predators who stalk children. Sometimes he draws that line in blood.In Blossom, an old cellmate has summoned Burke to a fading Indiana mill town, where a young boy is charged with a crime he didn't commit and a twisted serial sniper has turned a local lover's lane into a killing field. And it's here that Burke meets Blossom, the brilliant, beautiful young woman who has her own reasons for finding the murderer - and her own idea of vengeance. Dense with atmosphere, savagely convincing, this is Vachss at his uncompromising best.
©1996 Andrew Vachss (P)2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Down Here
Summary
For years Burke has harbored an outlaw's hard love for Wolfe, the beautiful, driven former sex-crimes prosecutor who was fired for refusing to "go along to get along." So when Wolfe is arrested for the attempted murder of John Anson Wychek, a vicious rapist she once prosecuted, Burke deals himself in. That means putting together a distrustful alliance between his underground "family of choice," Wolfe's private network, and a rogue NYPD detective who has his own stake in the outcome. Burke knows that Wolfe’s alleged "victim," although convicted only once, is actually a serial rapist. The deeper he presses, the more gaping holes he finds in the prosecution’s case, but shadowy law enforcement agencies seem determined to protect Wychek at all costs, no matter who it sacrifices. Burke ups the ante by re-opening all the old "cold case” rape investigations, calls in a lot of markers from both sides of the law, and finally shows all the players why "down here" is no place for tourists.
©2005 Andrew Vachss (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Sacrifice
Summary
What — or who — could turn a gifted little boy into a murderous thing that calls itself "Satan’s Child"? In search of an answer, a man named Burke travels from a festering welfare hotel to a neat frame house where a voodoo priestess presides over a congregation of assassins. For this vigilante and unlicensed private eye has made it his business to defend the small victims whom the law has failed — even a child who has been made into a killer.Gripping and chillingly knowledgeable about the mechanisms of evil, Sacrifice is a thriller of savage authority from one of the best crime writers of our generation.
©1996 Andrew Vachss (P)2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Shella
Summary
From the author of the acclaimed Burke private-eye series comes an ambitious and chilling novel that shows us not only what evil is, but where it comes from. For Shella is nothing less than a tour of evil’s spawning ground, conducted by one of its natural predators. He is called “Ghost” because he is so nondescript as to be invisible and because he slays with such reflexive ease that he might be one of the dead. Once he traveled with a woman who was called “Shella” - because those who had treated her as a horrendously ill-used child had tried to make her come out of her shell. Now Shella has vanished in a wilderness of strip clubs and peep shows, and Ghost is looking for her, guided by a killer’s instinct and the recognition that can only exist between two people who have been damaged past the point of no return. The result is Andrew Vachss’s most compelling work to date, the thriller reimagined as a bleak romance of the damned.
©1994 Andrew Vachss (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Mask Market
Summary
They meet in a no-name diner. A shadowy man hands Burke a CD dossier of someone he wants found. Minutes later, as Burke watches from an alley, his client is gunned down by a professional hunter-killer team. Burke slips away, unsure if he's been spotted. Later, when he examines the dossier, he discovers that the missing woman is Beryl Preston, a girl he'd rescued from a brutal pimp 20 years earlier - when she was only 13 - and returned to her father.Now he has to find her again - not only because she might be in danger, but also because he has to prove to himself that his rescue mission hadn't been financed by a predator who wanted his "property" returned. His search will force him to confront a new kind of human ugliness and, finally, to practice the survivalist triage that has marked - and cursed - his life since childhood. In Mask Market, Burke the outlaw investigator finds himself searching for the truth: not only about a girl named Beryl, but also about himself.This is classic Burke: dark, dangerous, and galvanizing, from the opening scene to the explosive climax.
©2006 Andrew Vachss (P)2006 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Mortal Lock
Summary
A hit man stalks his mark at a race track. A sociopath crosses every moral boundary to become a published author. An ex-mercenary obsessively defends his "perimeter" from a dangerous interloper. A man for hire grudgingly accepts help from a teenage girl to track an online predator. In a dystopian future, young people struggle for survival underground, forming themselves into vicious gangs with only the graffiti of the "last journalists" accepted as truth. Andrew Vachss collects 20 tight, powerful stories - all from the past decade of his career, including some now published for the first time - along with an original screenplay. Together, they form Mortal Lock, a searing portrait of the criminal underworld, with both its depravity and humanity on display.
©2013 Andrew Vachss (P)2013 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Blackjack
Summary
Cross and his strange but multi-talented crew together form one of the most ruthless and efficient hired guns the world has known. In this first appearance in a novel, they take on an elusive serial killer who no one has ever seen. This savage murderer is leaving a trail of eviscerated bodies all over the world. Despite knowing the Cross team as ultimate mercenaries, a shadowy team of government operatives hires them to track and capture - but not kill - this elusive hunter, When a pattern is finally deduced in the seemingly random strikes, the Cross crew devises an elaborate plan that will put their leader directly into the creature's path.
©2012 Andrew Vachss (P)2012 Dreamscape Audio, LLC
Veil's Visit
Summary
Booklist called them "two of the unlikeliest but most likable amateur detectives in crime fiction" and The Chicago Tribune describes them as "colorful... lunatic... like a twister". They're Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, and if you've been reading Joe R. Lansdale's Hap & Leonard novels like Mucho Mojo, The Two-Bear Mambo, and Rumble Tumble, then this is the treat you've been waiting for. Veil's Visit is an original Hap & Leonard short story co-authored by Joe R. Lansdale and Andrew Vachss, in which Leonard gets taken to court to answer for burning down a crack house.
©1999 Joe R. Lansdale & Andrew Vachss (P)2019 Encyclopocalypse Publications
Hard Candy
Summary
In this mercilessly compelling thriller, Burke - the private eye, sting artist, and occasional hit man who metes out a cruelly ingenious vengeance on those who victimize children - is up against a soft-spoken messiah who may be rescuing runaways or recruiting them for his own hideous purposes. But in doing so, Burke becomes a target for an entire Mafia family, a whore with a heart of cyanide, and a contract killer as implacable as a heart-seeking missile. Written with Vachss' signature narrative overdrive - and with his unnerving familiarity with the sub-basement of American crime - Hard Candy is vintage Burke.
©1990 Andrew Vachss (P)2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
The Questioner
Summary
An all-new novelette by Andrew Vachss, author of the acclaimed Burke series. For all secrets created, a tiny percentage is kept against any intrusion. The ultimate extractor of such secrets is the Questioner - a man who has trained himself to become empty, who uses that emptiness to listen fully, to sense what others need to hear, to respond in ways that lead them to reveal their most protected thoughts. Disdaining torture or coercion, he mines those secrets with nothing more than conversation. For those who meet his price - governments, multinational corporations, and the most complex criminal organizations - the Questioner obtains information. The secrets he learns can create or topple empires, win or destroy fortunes, lubricate the gears of the world...or grind them to a halt. But as the Questioner moves from one target to the next, just beyond the outer edge of his probes lurks something dangerous to his own emptiness. It will force him to turn his powers inward, to ask how he became what he is, and to find a truth he has never sought. Andrew Vachss has been a federal investigator (USPHS), a social services caseworker, and directed a maximum security institution for “aggressive-violent” youths. Now a lawyer in private practice, he represents children and youth exclusively. He is the author of more than 30 novels and three collections of short stories, which have earned him such international awards as the Grand Prix de Littérature Policiére (France), the Falcon Award from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Deutschen Krimi Preis (Germany), and the Raymond Chandler Award (Italy), as well as graphic novels and a variety of special projects. Dan Boice has narrated more than 30 titles for Audible in multiple genres. When not speaking out loud into a microphone, he can be found reading two books at a time, cooking, or writing freelance for a game company.
©2018 Andrew Vachss (P)2018 Andrew Vachss