Burke’s newest customer is a female named Flood, who has the face of the angel, the body of the high-priced stripper, and the abilities of a specialist executioner. She wants Burke to find a monster for her – so she can eliminate him with her bare hands. In this cauterizing thriller, Andrew Vachss’s renegade personal eye teams up with a lethally gifted avenger to follow a child’s murderer through the catacombs of New York, where every alley is normally blind as well as the penthouses are as dangerous as the basements. Fearfully understanding, crackling with narrative stress, and created in prose as forceful being a hollow-point slug, Flood is certainly Burke at his deadliest – and Vachss at the top of his type. “An extraordinary thriller . . Vachss never flinches from your horror.” – Washington Post Publication World “Burke would eat Spade and Marlowe for breakfast, not even spitting out the bone fragments. [He] is one difficult, mean, pray-God-you-don’t-meet-him hombre.” – Boston Herald