Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Blue Belle
    Unavailable
    Blue Belle
    Unavailable
    Blue Belle
    Audiobook10 hours

    Blue Belle

    Written by Andrew Vachss

    Narrated by Phil Gigante

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Burke is one of the most cold-blooded yet strangely honorable heroes in the history of crime fiction, an outlaw who makes his living by preying on the most vicious of New York City's bottom-feeders, those who thrive on the suffering of children.

    In Andrew Vachss's tautly engrossing novel Burke is given a purse full of dirty money to find the infamous Ghost Van that is cutting a lethal swath among the teenage prostitutes in the hood. He also gets help in the form of a stripper named Belle, whose moves on the runway are outclassed only by what she can do in a getaway car. But not even Burke is prepared for the evil that is behind the Ghost Van or for the sheer menace of its guardian, a cadaverous karate expert who enjoys killing so much that he has named himself after death.

    "A book so ferocious, with characters so venal and actions so breakneck, that you dare not get in the way . . . . First rate." - Chicago Tribune
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateMar 9, 2010
    ISBN9781441820952
    Unavailable
    Blue Belle

    Related to Blue Belle

    Related audiobooks

    Mystery For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Space for Bette Howland

      May 6, 2019

      A Space for Bette Howland
      7 min read

    • Article

      Ten Books Every Creative Person Should Read

      Jul 3, 2019

      Keep them on your desk for those times you need to be reminded that though the creative life might be lonely, you are not alone. The post Ten Books Every Creative Person Should Read appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Body Language

      Aug 14, 2019

      Body Language
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Allure of Messy Reddit Stories

      Mar 19, 2023

      Jerusalem Demsas’s culture and entertainment picks include Children of Time, Vampire Weekend, and chasing down stories people tell—or make up—on Reddit.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Voyages

      Dec 3, 2018

      Down to the sea!” my Uncle Ray would call out as his party guests started to leave after midnight. Waving a champagne bottle, he’d corral his friends and me into a caravan of taxis bound for the West Side docks, where, according to newspaper listings

      14 min read

    • Article

      American Myth: The Short, Beautiful Life of Breece D’J Pancake

      Jun 26, 2017

      The best American writer of his generation would have been sixty-five this week. The post American Myth: The Short, Beautiful Life of Breece D’J Pancake appeared first on The Millions.

      14 min read

    • Article

      Flood The World With Beauty

      Nov 1, 2019

      A big literary conference is probably not the best place for a poet dealing with a mental breakdown. But there I was at AWP, skittishly perusing tables at the book fair, under the garish lights of the Minneapolis Convention Center. For two years, par

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Old Un’s Notes

      Oct 20, 2021

      The Old Un’s Notes
      6 min read

    • Article

      Speedboat

      Mar 24, 2022

      Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written – disrupting a cliché and, presumably, creating a genre. That was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I fi nd,

      14 min read

    • Article

      Joy And Nakedness At San Francisco’s Dyke March: Phyllis Christopher’s Best Photograph

      Jan 12, 2022

      In San Francisco, the night before the annual Pride parade is reserved for the Dyke March, a celebration of lesbian life throughout the city. It was like our Christmas – the biggest night of the year – and half of us would be so hungover we wouldn’t

      3 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Aug 22, 2022

      Books
      6 min read

    • Article

      Aughts

      Sep 11, 2017

      Aughts
      23 min read

    Reviews for Blue Belle

    4/5

    119 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      The third Burke novel and as with the previous two, titled after the woman central to the story. As I was reading, this was easily my least favorite so far--and by a wide margin. I’ll put aside the transparent mystery of the Ghost Van. That’s a time issue. In 1988, when Blue Belle was published, it would take more than half the book to figure it out. It’s hardly fair to hold that against Vachss since it’s because of the tireless work of him and others like him that these things are no longer a dirty secret here in 2016. It was Belle I had the problem with. We got essentially the same scene between her and Burke over and over: her desperate need for his love, his need for her to conform to the rules by which he lives his life, the clash of the two, and an accepted agreement or stalemate. Mix and repeat. And repeat. And repeat.Not that Belle wasn’t an interesting character. Sprinkling her past into scenes like these is one of Vachss’ premier skills. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough history to invigorate these exchanges as they started to repeat themselves. But remember, I qualified my comments with “as I was reading.” Once we got down to dealing with the main villain and the cost of doing so, Blue Belle was as good as anything Vachss has written (conceding I’m three novels and one co-written short story into his work). A great ending can cover a multitude of sins. And this hardly qualified as a multitude.
    • 3/5
      I like the writing and I like the stories, but sometimes it seems things that should be built-up to, just happen.
      Without giving away any spoilers, a girl calls him, he calls back for info and then she's naked and telling him she loves him.
      C'mon man! Give me at least a half page of wooing for realities sake, lol.
    • 4/5
      If you like the earlier Burke books you'll probably like this one. Vachss pulls back the curtain slightly more on Burke's psychology. I enjoy how he explains some odd behaviors and why they make sense to a, um, non-citizen.I enjoy Vachss' dialog but he goes just a little too far in stripping it down, to the point where you wonder if anyone actually talks that way.Maybe I'm just cynical but Vachss did not sell me well enough on why Burke would fall so hard for Belle when he's still thinking of Flood.Belle was an odd mix of competent (such a pro getaway driver) and ignorant (the "rules"). Also her physical description had me confused and made her seem less human.The whole deal about keeping Max away from Mortay was contrived. He was worried that even if Max won he would be "known" for dropping Mortay? Couple of issues with that. Lots of people wanted to drop Mortay so it wouldn't be obvious who managed it (as we find in the next book, Hard Candy!) and Burke himself gets that rep he didn't want Max to have, even though it really was Max's fight. Oh, and put me down for a C-note on Max to win, lol!Okay, so I sound like I'm griping too much here. I don't come to Vachss with high expectations, as I might with Charlie Huston. I come to be swept away with a gritty tale of urban underbelly fantasy. He did that here and did it with style.
    • 3/5
      Finally the last book in the series that I had yet to read. One of the better ones as it is an early one and the story w/ Burke and co. gets filled in more. Another fast and loose read w/ energy and literally explosive endings.