Andrew H Vachss

When the shining star of the girls' softball team shoots and kills the most popular boy in school, Dolly, friend to the local teenage girls, asks her husband Dell to uncover the true motive behind the inexplicable crime.

When a client who had hired him to find a missing woman is gunned down just minutes after their meeting, Burke launches an investigation to find Beryl Preston, a girl he had rescued from a brutal pimp some twenty years earlier and returned to her father.

"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--the reigning #1 city in homicides--has no shortage of deadly gangs. They all know the Cross Crew occupies a cinderblock bunker called Red 71 . . . the last place you want to go, unless you're willing to risk it being the last place you...

Becoming Carmine Trentoni's hitman after emerging from prison, Wesley locates Pet and the two set up shop in Brooklyn, executing 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. The background story of ruthless assassin Wesley traces his emergence from prison as a calculating hitman...