Mortal Lock

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.

A hit man stalks his mark at a race track. A sociopath crosses every moral boundary to become a published author. An ex-mercenary obsessively defends his “perimeter” from a dangerous interloper. A man for hire grudgingly accepts help from a teenage girl to track an online predator. In a dystopian future, young people struggle for survival underground, forming themselves into vicious gangs with only the graffiti of the “last journalists” accepted as truth. Andrew Vachss collects twenty tight, powerful stories—all from the past decade of his career, including some now published for the first time—along with an original screenplay. Together, they form Mortal Lock, a searing portrait of the criminal underworld, with both its depravity and humanity on display.

“The baddest noir stylist of them all digs into his archives from the past 15 years and comes up with 20 visits to hell.”
Kirkus

Ghostwriter
Sure Thing
Bloodlines
Passage to Paradise
Veil’s Visit (with Joe R. Lansdale)
Dead Reliable
Choice of Weapons
They’re All Alike
Half-Breed


Pig
A Piece of the City
Seeding the Ground
As the Crow Flies
Blood Test
Profile
Last Rights
Postwar Boom
La Corazón del Niños
Screenplay: Underground

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