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    Down in the Zero
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    Down in the Zero
    Unavailable
    Down in the Zero
    Audiobook9 hours

    Down in the Zero

    Written by Andrew Vachss

    Narrated by Phil Gigante

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Andrew Vachss has reinvented detective fiction for an age in which guilty secrets are obsolete and murder isn't even worth a news headline. And in the person of his haunted, hell-ridden private eye Burke, Vachss has given us a new kind of hero: a man inured to every evil except the kind that preys on children.

    Now Burke is back, investigating an epidemic of apparent suicides among the teenagers of a wealthy Connecticut suburb. There he discovers a sinister connection between the anguish of the young and the activities of an elite sadomasochistic underground, for whom pain and its accompanying rituals are a source of pleasure and power.

    "[Vachss's] short sharp sentences crackle with energy; his plots are satisfyingly elaborate; the narratives are beautifully paced, and the characters . . . are always pungently individual." - Chicago Sun-Times

    "The characters and events are as sharply defined as if they were etched in steel. The prose is short and choppy, like the ticking of a time bomb about to explode." - Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateJul 6, 2010
    ISBN9781441821256
    Unavailable
    Down in the Zero

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    Reviews for Down in the Zero

    4/5

    84 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The trouble with hardboiled fiction is that it's so ripe for parody. Even at its best this style of writing is so very unselfconscious, so glaringly stripped down--yeah, I know the all the words, it seems to be saying, but I'm so tough I only need to use a few of them. Sometimes that works. Chandler. Cain. Hammett. The guys who invented the genre and worked in its first generation.And the trouble with neo-hardboiled fiction is that layered on top of that lurking urge to parody is our contemporary age's blasted worship of all things meta, our adoration of all things self-referential. There are certainly some who rise above; Walter Mosley writes in a beautiful contemporary hardboiled style, one all his own which doesn't eschew real vocabulary and rich description, and which doesn't wink at the reader. Andrew Vachss, I have just learned, can make that same claim.Most of Vachss crime novels center on Burke--just the one name--an ex-con, unlicensed private investigator, career criminal, Child of the Secret. ("Children of the Secret" is a term coined by Vachss,who has been active in both child and animal protection; they are abused children [and erstwhile children] who have been victimized but never experienced justice.) Burke has put together a family of these people--and dogs--and he protects them more ferociously than he protects himself. Down in the Zero finds Burke called out to the suburbs of Connecticut by Randy, the son of a woman he had known briefly many years before. The boy--a feckless nineteen year old--is terrified by a rash of suicides among his peers; he thinks that the deaths were only made to look like suicides, and that he may be a future target. Burke, who looks into the Zero (the abyss, the blackness on the other side, the nothingness of non-existence) on a regular basis feels the boy's pain and fear more than he wants to admit, so he agrees to help him out.During the course of his investigation Burke unearths some really nasty little secrets not very well buried beneath the veneer of genteel respectability for which Connecticut suburbs are so well known. He meets a pair of dominatrix sisters, learns that there is a highly specialized sex club in this small town, and discovers a blackmail ring.Yowza.Burke also--using nothing more than his own ability to be himself and to cut through the shit--helps Randy start to narrow in on some meaning in life, and to become an actual person. Randy even gets a new name, in a passage of male-bonding so beautiful I cried. "'We give you a name, mahn,' Clarence said, caught up in the idea. 'Like a baptism.'....That night didn't have a chance against the kid's smile." Oh, and the name is Sonny, because there "ain't but two names for the outlaw game...It's Junior. Or Sonny."The plot is extremely intricate, with several seemingly unrelated threads: an awful lot is packed into a mere 259 pages. Vachss's writing is a revelation; he keeps his stripped down style well on the right side of that parody line, and if he's being meta about anything, well, this reader certainly didn't pick up on it. His prose is choppy and blunt; Vachss is a big fan of the ellipsis and the dash, and he uses them to great effect. At the time of the publication of Down in the Zero, 1994, Andrew Vachss already had more than a half dozen novels under his belt. I hadn't read any of them and now, fifteen years later, I've only just read Down in the Zero. I won't wait fifteen years before picking up more of his books, though.
    • 4/5
      Burke, Vachss' anti-hero, is a quasi-detective, part vigilante, who has a soft spot for protecting children. We learn during the course of the novel that he grew up in an orphanage, has no memory of either parent, has served time in prison, where he learned much of his "trade" from the "Prof" who speaks in bizarre rhymes, and was a mercenary in Africa.

      In this novel (basically your good, fun, fast, read - great for trains, planes or buses), he is summoned to help protect a young boy whose mother Burke had known briefly in the distant past. Randy, who lives in a very wealthy area, is concerned because many of his friends have been committing suicide, and he thinks someone, or something, is driving them to it. All of them have been treated by the Crystal Cove mental facility, and all of them took their lives within ninety days after having been treated and released. Sensing there may be money to be made in the arrangement somewhere, Burke is soon in the middle of a bizarre
      scheme to hide people by giving them new identities, and a concomitant blackmail scheme mixed up with some rather kinky sex.

      Burke is not perhaps as interesting a character as Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, but he certainly keeps your attention.
    • 4/5
      Great story!
      Burke seems quite different in this one, not sure how I feel about that.
      Kinda miss the old Burke, but the new Burke is cool too.
      Looking forward to how this goes.
    • 4/5
      One of the best in the Burke series. Tough to put down.