Mask Market (Burke Series #16) » (Unabridged, 7 CDs, 8 hrs.)

Andrew Vachss is a lawyer who represents children and youths exclusively. His many novels and two collections of short stories have been translated into twenty languages, and his work has appeared in Parade, Esquire, Playboy, and The New York Times, among other publications. A native New Yorker, he divides his time between the city of his birth and the Pacific Northwest.

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.

Publishers Weekly

Wirth's vocal interpretation of Burke, Vachss's famously driven defender of oppressed children and women, is an insightful mixture-tough, unruffled, pensive, dangerous and, considering the character's past hard-boiled appearances, surprisingly tender at times. The novel marks a sort of rebirth for the self-appointed sleuth, who is wearing a new face, thanks to an assassin's bullet and a skilled surgeon, and an outlook that is at least a shade less grim than in the past. This time, he's hunting for a woman he saved from a life of prostitution 20 years ago. She knows why his latest client was murdered and by whom. But she doesn't want to be found. Burke's detecting process is relatively straightforward, depending, as usual, on his "family" of colorful streetwise characters, each of whom is given his or her due via Wirth's dexterous delivery. Vachss also allows his protagonist a little more time than usual for self-reflection, as well as a prolonged romantic relationship that could, for once, end happily, and again Wirth rises to the challenge, softening Burke's hard edges during those sequences without turning him into a sentimental sap. Simultaneous release with the Pantheon hardcover (Reviews, June 5). (Sept.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.