SACRIFICE

A routine sixth outing for Vachss's dark knight Burke—that is, a bitter cup overflowing with satanic child-rape, multiple personality disorder, voodoo, execution-murders, and other workaday hazards of the ``outlaw'' p.i.'s ever-more bleak—and vengeful—Gotham half-life. Back from a series-freshening trip to Indiana (Blossom, 1990), Burke again surrounds himself with series regulars (martial-arts master Max the Silent, electronic wizard Mole, etc.) who play Robin to his Batman as he again takes on child abusers—attorney Vachss's legal foes in real life. What is missing is the sort of strong heroine (Flood, Blue Belle, etc.) who in the past has grounded Burke's high-voltage vigilantism; here, Burke's main female companionship is provided by a prostitute—representative of the sort of nasty turns that dominate the novel, which opens with Burke posing as a blind man to nail a ``freak''—a child abuser. Soon, bigger prey beckons: a child-porn ring with satanic trappings whose grim abuse has made a multiple personality of one eight-year-old Luke, with one of the personalities a stone killer. A crusading D.A. wants to try Luke for murder, but Burke persuades her to go after the cult—a decision that, coupled with his work on another case, sweeps him into a netherworld inhabited by, among others, a wealthy pedophile, a demented counterfeiter, a slick gun-runner, and an alluring voodoo queen. The brutal action is slightly sweetened by Burke's tutelage of a young, personable gangster, and significantly soured by his self-pitying running commentary (``I live under the darkness, where it's safe. Safe from things so secret that they have no name'')—and explodes in a merciless mass-killing by Burke of the cult, blood-revenge for his own sufferings as a child. Vachss still writes a mean page, full of sound and fury; but his spike-hard prose and action are blunted by a moralism that smugly sets Burke up as the most obnoxiously self-righteous—and increasingly one-note—judge, jury, and executioner since Mike Hammer.