Everybody Pays ─ Stories

A hit man defies the confines of a life sentence to avenge his sister's batterer.??An immaculately dressed man hires a street gang to extract his daughter from a Central American prison, for reasons as mysterious as they are deadly.??A two-bit graffiti artist with a taste for Nazi-ganda finds himself face-to-face with three punks out to make a mark of their own—literally—with a tattoo needle.

From neo-noir master Andrew Vachss comes Everybody Pays, 38 white-knuckle rides into a netherworld of pederasts and prostitutes, stick-up kids and fall guys—where private codes of crime and punishment pulsate beneath a surface system of law and order, and our moral??compass spins frighteningly out of control. Here is the street-grit prose that has earned Vachss comparisons to Chandler, Cain, and Hammett--and the ingenious plot twists that transform the double-cross into an expression of retribution, the dark deed into a thing of beauty. Electrifying and enigmatic, Everybody Pays?is a sojourn into the nature of evil itself—a trip made all the more frightening by its proximity to our front doorstep.

Vachss has been a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, a social caseworker, and a labor organizer, and has directed a maximum-security prison for youthful offenders.? Now a lawyer in private practice, he represents children and youth exclusively.? He is the author of numerous novels, including the burke series, two collection of short stories, and a wide variety of other material including song lyrics, poetry, graphic novels, and a "children's book for adults." His books have been translated into twenty different languages; and his work has appeared in Parade, Antaeus, Esquire, The New York Times, and numerous other forums.? He lives and works in New York City and Pacific Northwest.

The dedicated Web site for Vachss and his work is www.vachss.com