Down in the Zero

   Andrew Vachss has reinvented detective fiction for an age in which guilty secrets are obsolete and murder isn't even worth a news headline. And in the person of his haunted, hell-ridden private eye Burke, Vachss has given us a new kind of hero: a man inured to every evil except the kind that preys on children. 
   Now Burke is back, investigating an epidemic of apparent suicides among teenagers of a wealthy Connecticut suburb.  There he discovers a sinister connection between the anguish of the young and the activities of an elite sadomasochistic underground, for whom pan and its accompanying rituals are a source of pleasure—and power

"Vachss is in the first rank of American crime writers."- Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Deliciously scummy... His bad guys are memorably heinous."-Washington Post Book World

"[Vachss's] short sharp sentences crackle with energy; his plots are satisfyingly elaborate; the narratives are beautifully paced, and the characters... are always pungently individual."- Chicago-Sun Times

"The characters and events are as sharply defined as if they were etched in steel. The prose is short and choppy, like the ticking of a time bomb."-Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Andrew Vachss’s many books include the Burke novels and two previous collections of short stories. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and his work has appeared in Parade, Antaeus, Esquire, Playboy, and The New York Times, among other publications. He died in 2021.