I liked Vachss' "Two Trains Running," so I decided to give this other Burke novel a whirl. Unfortunately, the whirl turned into vertigo...That metaphor is typical of the narrator's speech. About halfway through this stale New York noir piece, I looked up the author online. Vachss, an attorney who specializes in child protection cases, has written way, way too many of these Burke novels, 22 to be exact. What some reviewer called "Dickensian larger-than-life" characters, however, I found to be the old, shopworn crew of male midlife crises: the big-breasted woman, the Asian bodyguard, the damaged narrator, the pit bulls with hearts of gold, etc, ad nauseam. Ditto for the underworld slang repartee between them. One thing I liked: the narrators' loathing of loud public "jabbering" on cell phones. In a scene on the Metro North Line, a hacker jams the cells of the "howler monkeys" in the car. For me that was a satisfying fantasy. The reason that "Trains" is so much better, I think, is that it's set in a Midwestern city, minus all the stock "family" and underworld figures of the New York Burke novels. I'll have to be pretty hard up to wade through another Vachss production.
Stop me if you've heard this one. A guy hires a private dick to find a woman...okay, okay, I've stopped. The only catches here are: 1. Right after hiring Burke to do the sniffing, the guy is gunned down in the street.2. Burke has already looked for, and found, this woman once before, years ago when she was a girl.Reading a Burke novel can be many things - depressing, horrifying, disgusting, sometimes entertaining and fascinating, and did I mention depressing? They are at the very least interesting. Except for this one. Perhaps it's because this has all been done before by others, and by Vachss himself, that this one feels so tired and dull. Maybe it's because Burke is looking for a grown woman who appears to be in no immediate danger that there was no sense of urgency to the action. It's possible that after sixteen books in the series, even the author is getting bored with this character.I don't know, but this was a chore to read.
