Post Burke

After lawyer, child protection advocate and author Andrew Vachss ended his best-known Burke series with 2008's Another Life, he published several standalone novels before taking a crack at another recurring series. When he did in 2012, using the mercenary Cross and his crew for hire, he didn't really break new ground.

Blackjack borrows the story Vachss wrote for the Dark Horse comic book Predator: Race War in the early 1990s and tweaks it to remove references to the hunting alien made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1987 movie. He then combines it with a previously published short story about Cross's crew and ties them together rather loosely around some of the characters of the comic book adaptation.

The alliance is a shaky one, and the seams show clearly. The second story, in which Cross and his crew have to try to outsmart a crimelord who has taken one of their own captive, seems very much like what it is: A second story grafted into the first one's tale of mysterious murders coming to a head in a prison already boiling with racial tension. Both are told in Vachss' over-the-top pulp tough-guy prose, which doesn't work nearly as well here as it did when helping the career criminal Burke present his tough-guy face to the world. For Burke, the image was part of the affect and the face he showed the world to protect himself and those he loved. But with Cross and company, it's image with no substance behind it to care about. The mysterious entity or entities that are at the root of the killing are left unexplained; whether Vachss takes them up again in later Cross books is yet to be seen and makes the already retread-y Blackjack lose even more of its good will.

Cross and his mercenaries were great characters in small doses in several short stories Vachss collected over his career, but this version of their chronicles limps badly from the start and stumbles over its creator's sermonizing attitude and the incomplete revision and union of the source materials.

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With 2013's Aftershock, Vachss created a completely new stage for himself by introducing us to former French Legionnaire and mercenary Adelbert Jackson and his wife Dolly, herself once a nurse in a worldwide medical relief organization. "Dell" created new identities for them after they fell in love so they could vanish from the radar of the kind of people who'd hired him, and they settled in a small Pacific Northwest coastal town.

But small towns and idyllic scenery often hide dark secrets, and some of those begin to come to the front when a star high school athlete shoots a fellow student on the last day of class. The student -- Mary -- was one known by Dolly and she believes there is much more to the shooting than the bare facts of the case. She enlists Dell's help in learning the truth -- for although Dell's skills may not have been employed on behalf of the innocent on any regular basis prior to this, they will be just as effective in uncovering the dark narrative that played out that day, and he will employ them as ruthlessly on this mission as he has on any other.

Aftershock has a lot to like about it. Dell and Dolly's relationship offers a nice change from Burke's marriage to revenge. A lawyer Dell enlists early in the novel has a nice character arc in which he discovers he has both honor and a spine and employs them both.

It also has a lot that's much less likeable. Part of the quest to learn the truth behind Mary's actions involves a mean con game run on a young girl. This apparently becomes OK when the wise Guru ex Machina Therapist deems her as nothing but a sociopath -- I guess because using people as a means to an end is acceptable when they're people who use others as means to an end. Dell and Dolly encourage more than one young woman shamed by body image issues to accept themselves as beautiful for who they are -- but it's OK for Dell to make fun of one of the prosecuting attorneys for his appearance by using a cruel nickname instead of the character's actual name. Some of the better set pieces are lifted from Vachss' earlier novels without much tweaking. And we spend quite a bit of time uncovering the identity of someone who began the criminal conspiracy that ensnared Mary -- even though we don't need to. Plus, Vachss once again spends a lot of time giving his characters speeches about the points he wants to make, instead of following his earlier career pattern of allowing the story itself to unveil and emphasize those points.

Both series hold promise. And the Burke series had devolved into a lot of long monologues from Burke or his family of choice about things Vachss wanted to say, so a fresh start was not a bad idea. But Cross needs some serious ironing out and Dell and Dolly need to dial back the self-righteousness to give either of them legs to really last.