Another Life (Burke Series #18) Book

"I'm looking for a plot where the guy has sex with women - not romantic sex; with prostitutes, or even rape - and brings his son along to watch, so he can teach the kid how to do it."
Now, make the kid a baby and you have the nugget of the last book in the Burke series. The baby is kidnapped during one of the lessons and the father wants him back. Or does he? I am betting you might not be interested. But you have been reading the Burke series for a couple of years and this is the last book.

The last series I remember reading right to the end was "The Hardy Boys" and that was probably 55 years ago. I remember that I had most of the books that I had purchased at the Book Worm, the book store a block from home, at a dollar each. One day I decided I was too grown up to read about Frank and Joe any more so I sold the entire collection to the son of one of my mother's friends. The strange thing is that I had just bought the last book just days before I sold them all. It was a sea change for me. I was just done with these books overnight.

Now the same thing has happened to me with Burke but I don't exactly know what to do with the stack of books in the series I have accumulated over the past several years. But I have this last book in the series to finish before I have to make that life decision!

What would a Burke conclusion look like? Well, it has some flashbacks to old stories to explain why enemies trust each other and make handshake deals with each other. And it has some fabricated history to show that the current contrived deal fits in with the past. We have Pryce with the webbed hands making fictitious events real and legally exist. We have rulers who manipulate common people into becoming human lab rats: polio in Nigeria, HIV in South Africa. We have a special convoluted version of history with the Japanese banzai pilots and the Nazi scientists. Special Burke history to make weird become the normal where the Prof gets the same medical care as the U.S. President "if he took a bullet." And for free.

So we need a big time belief in the Burke worldview conjured up to make it all work. This is not uncommon for a Burke story but this is the pièce de résistance. All Burke has to do is a little bit of the impossible. And, for his end of the deal, he just has to do the best he can do - even die trying - because the Prof and the rest of the family are worth it.
"Okay. You tell me what you want; I do it, period. For that, I get the Prof and Terry . . . and that other stuff you mentioned. Done?"
He nodded.
"What if I can't pull off . . . whatever you want?"
"You still get everything I promised. But you have to go at it with everything you've - "
"This is a blood contract." I cut him off. "I'll do it, or I'll die trying." I gave him a few seconds to scan me, opening myself up to whatever truth-detecting skills he thought he had. "Deal?"
He held out his webbed right hand. I grasped it. Tight, like it was the Prof's only chance to live.
Am I on board with this?

No. But I am determined to try to finish this series honestly, like Burke demands. He and I have been through too much to bail out now, I think. Can I do it?

Vachss reminds us something that we learned very early on - at the start - that Prof can stand for Prophet or Professor. And Vachss also reminds us that he is dealing with what he calls "freaks" who use children as a part of their aberrant sex. How does the kidnapped baby of the rich oil sheikh fit into all of this? Since it is Vachss, we can be assured that the answer to that question will not be simple and there will be some prurient interest involved. Also knowing Vachss, there will be some strong sexual allusions but graphic sex will be very limited. Vachss does not write books that lend themselves to masturbatory use. But, since I am flashing around some French superlatives, let me not miss out on saying the obvious: Vachss probably wants Burke to go out with a Tour de Force. He makes opportunities to remind us of Wesley, the killing machine "brother" who just might not be dead. I expect to see every known Burke gesture and verbal parry. He has so much to say that Vachss must take paragraphs of saying nothing so we can understand his omniscience.
I said nothing, just tilted my head to show I was listening.
What an asshole! Oh, excuse me, Mr. Burke. But two can play this game as you, of course, well know.
He shifted posture to ask the unspoken question.
I shifted mine, to say I wasn't going to answer.
With Vachss it is always the challenge of putting the puzzle together. That means you have to enjoy that kind of thing. That is important because you will probably not care too much about who kidnapped the infant son of a Saudi sheikh. You will have to care about watching Burke fit the complex pieces together to solve the puzzle. As I have probably already said too often, the biggest challenge for me in reading this book was to enjoy going through that process with Burke one more time. The balance weighed too heavy too often on the don't-much-care, the let's-just-get-on-with-it side.

Although it is obvious by book eighteen in the series:
No matter how the people who live below the underground figured it, any version of the Burke they knew would never pass up the chance to make a pile of cash and take out a couple of babyrapers at the same time. Some people are confused about my motivations, but nobody doubted my hate. If certain humans crossed my path, they were done, Pay me enough, and I'd go out and cross theirs.
But since it is book eighteen, Vachss must think it is his last chance to fire with both barrels, to get messy. You can always count on hearing about a wide range of social and political issues. International relations are always fair game.
I remember the Prof chuckling out loud at the whole idea of arming America's friend-of-the-moment. "Fools think, just 'cause they can get a snake to dance, it won't bit 'em the second it gets a chance."
I don't think it is a spoiler to say that Burke rides off into the sunrise on a train. I mean, how else could it end?
"It's all done, son," the Prof said, just before sunrise. But I knew he was only talking about one piece of it.
I don't know what's next. I can't hear the whistle yet, but I can feel the vibrations through the tracks.
A freight train's coming, and I'm going to hop it blind. I don't know what it's carrying, but I know it'll take me to where I need to go.
Another life.
The wrap up for Burke?
"You live outside the law. You support yourself by crime. You don't experience guilt as a normal person might. In fact, you find some forms of aggression to be fulfilling, at least temporarily so. You're filled with rage that you . . . eventually . . . learned to control. Not because you wanted to be a better person; because you wanted to be a more skillful criminal."
Rating this conclusive book is tough for me. I want to give it two stars because it just tried to do too much. Vachss tried to distill the entire series into one dramatic conclusion where Burke reinvents the beginning of his life that converts his mother from whore to heroine. There are a stunning number of one sentence, one line, one paragraph diamonds in the rough but the setting is too limited and the book is too short to display their full glory. Burke tries to replace his beloved dog and deliver Terry and Clarence to the world of "citizens" while evidently going fully into his trance with the red dot.

My compromise rating is three stars. I think of Vachss in my imagination as a four star writer so I am surprised to find that I rated eight of the eighteen Burke books as only three stars. (The remaining ten are four stars.) Burke's failing for me has been that he is too often too complex. I say without embarrassment that if I were a reader who retained more detail from his books, I would find Vachss more stimulating and therefore more enjoyable. I am simply not quite up to the intellectual level of the writing. It might also have been a benefit to read the books in their actual historical timeframe. There are many references to news, issues and events that would be more meaningful if they were fresh in my mind.

So, the fact is, I was ready for the Burke series to come to a conclusion before the books stopped coming out. And since I was often reading as much as a decade later, I was not as alert to the out of sync references to events and politics. I was no longer certain that Burke was a progressive political vigilante and feared that he might identify too closely with some Tea Party attributes. All in all, I had met my psychic need to complete the series but had definitely ended with a whimper rather than a bang. Too bad. There were many pages and moments I enjoyed Burke quite a lot in the past several years. But, anyone want a complete 18 book, slightly out of date series?