About this item
Around here, even dying can be hard. Horribly hard. Only death itself comes easy. By easy, I mean frequent. Death happens so often that people regard it pretty much the same as the never-ending rain. When life itself is hard, you have to be hard to live. Even a bitch will cull one of her own pups if she doesn't think he's going to be tough enough--she knows she's only got but so much milk, and there's none to waste.Survival isn't some skill we learned--it's in all our genes. Nobody needed to be told to step aside when they saw the Beast coming. But not everyone stepped fast enough. There's rock slides. Floods, too. Those are natural phenomena. You live here, you expect them. But just because a man's found under tons of rock, or floating in the river, doesn't mean his death was due to natural causes.
About the Author
Andrew Vachss has been a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, a social-services caseworker, a labor organizer, and has directed a maximum-security prison for "aggressive-violent" youth. Now a lawyer in private practice, he represents children and youth exclusively, and is a founding member of the Legislative Drafting Institute for Child Protection. He is the author of numerous novels, including the Burke series, three collections of short stories, and a wide variety of other material including song lyrics, graphic novels, essays, and a "children's book for adults." He is most currently engaged in the work of the Legislative Drafting Institute for Child Protection (ldicp.org) . His books have been translated into twenty languages, and his work has appeared in Parade, Antaeus, Esquire, Playboy, The New York Times, and many other forums. His books have been awarded the Grand Prix de Littérature Policiére, the Falcon Award, Deutschen Krimi Preis, Die Jury des Bochumer Krimi Archivs and the Raymond Chandler Award (per Giurìa a Noir in Festival, Courmayeur, Italy) . Andrew Vachss' latest books are Mortal Lock (Vintage, May 2013) , SignWave (Pantheon, June 2015) , and Carbon (Haverhill House, 2019) . The dedicated Web site for Vachss and his work is vachss.com.