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Loading... Mask Market: A Burke Novel (Burke Novels) (original 2006; edition 2006)by Andrew Vachss
Work InformationMask Market by Andrew Vachss (Author) (2006)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. The weakest book in the series -- you can check the GR ratings. Burke agrees to meet a guy in a bar, who wants him to track someone down; however, the guy is gunned down when he goes to get Burke's retainer, making Burke wonder whether they were after him. Vachss then spends the rest of the first half of the book blathering about past cases, Burke's family, Pansy's death, eventually tying the dead guy to an earlier rescue case. Perhaps Vachss has fallen into the Patricia Cornwell trap of preferring her characters over a plot. Hope not. ( ) I've enjoyed the Burke novels for some time now (they sort of bleed together after a while, but I enjoy Vachss's style a lot) - this is one of the weaker ones. Burke stories seem to be at their best when they're relatively uncomplicated affairs - the story here is complicated and all over the place, and the book suffers as a result. I love Burke stories and was not disappointed with Mask Market. It's Burke himself who is so compelling as a truly admirable antihero. In this one we get more of Burke's family: Prof, Max, Michelle, the Mole, etc., all extraordinary, all freakish, all with something to teach, and all adhering to an us vs. them moral code that reads as completely natural. Burke revisits one of his earlier "rescues" when an erstwhile teen runaway pops up in the middle of his current investigation, whereabouts unknown. As usual, Vachss uses the circumstances to express Burke's unrelenting emotional pain and his own scathing views on the American justice system and the children who fall through its cracks. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to SeriesBurke (16)
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 twenty years earlier--when she was only thirteen--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. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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