Hard Candy

In this mercilessly compelling thriller, Burke—the private eye, sting artist, and occasional hit man who metes out a cruelly ingenious vengeance on those who victimize children—is up against a soft-spoken messiah, who may be rescuing runaways or recruiting them for his own hideous purposes. But in doing so Burke becomes a target for an entire Mafia family, a whore with a heart of cyanide, and a contract killer as implacable as a heat-seeking missile. Written with Vachss's signature narrative overdrive—and his unnerving familiarity with the sub-basement of American crime—Hard Candy is vintage Burke.

Burke's newest client is a woman named Flood, who has the face of an angel, the body of a high-priced stripper, and the skills of a professional executioner. She wants Burke to find a monster for her—so she can kill him with her bare hands.
In this cauterizing thriller, Andrew Vachss' renegade private eye teams up with a lethally gifted avenger to follow a child's murderer through the catacombs of New York, where every alley is blind and the penthouses are as dangerous as the basements. Fearfully knowing, crackling with narrative tension, and written in prose as forceful as a hollow-point slug, Flood is Burke at his deadliest—and Vachss at the peak of his form.

Andrew Vachss’s implacable private eye has a new client, Strega. She wants Burke to find an obscene photograph and that search will take him into the ocean that flows just beneath the city, an ocean whose currents are flesh and money, the anguish of children and the pleasure of twisted adults. It is a place that Burke can visit only at the risk of his sanity and his life. But between the power of Strega and his own sense of justice, there is no turning back.
In Strega one of our most acclaimed crime writers gives us a thriller that might have been imagined by Dante. For this is a tour of hell with no stops left out, conducted by a novelist who writes with the authority of the damned.

Pinball Effect: Journeys Through Knowledge

In this captivating, intriguing program, author and television host James Burke takes you on five voyages through the great, dynamic web of historical change to show "how sometimes the simplest act will have cosmic repercussions a hundred years later." Continuing the journey that began with Connections and continued with The Day the Universe Changed and The Axemaker's Gift, Burke draws on years of research and his powerful storytelling abilities to illuminate "the cliff-hanging, detective-story excitement of the myriad different processes by which change occurs."

In The Hour Before Midnight

Stacey Wyatt is a gifted pianist. He is also a competent mercenary soldier. But at the moment, he is sojourning in an Egyptian prison.
Sean Burke has plans to rescue him. Charity is not his motive. He merely needs Stacey for what becomes a deadly intrigue. There is just one hitch.
Stacey Wyatt is a typical Higgins creation. Born into a life of privilege, raised by a Sicilian capo, he escapes into a world of the mercenary and finally learns, almost too late, where his true loyalties should lie. Is Sean Burke really the true friend, or an opportunist who could shed Wyatt like an old shirt? What about Joanna, or Rose, or all the others.