Children’s advocate Andrew Vachss continues to write compelling edutainment.

By his own admission, all of Andrew Vachss’ fictional works are "Trojan horses" designed to educate readers about the horrors of child sexual abuse. So it’s to his credit that Vachss – a former labor organizer, social worker and director of a maximum-security prison for youthful offenders – avoids easy proselytizing in his critically acclaimed series of novels featuring his hard-boiled creation, Burke.

  A product of the New York state institutional and penal systems, Burke is equal parts private investigator and con man, equally likely to stage an elaborate sting on unsuspecting marks as he is to indulge in legitimate casework. He’s a rat in the nation’s largest urban maze, a loner with an uncanny knack for self-preservation (to call him paranoid would be to reveal the inadequacies of the term) and a soft spot for children in trouble.

  In Dead and Gone, Vachss shakes up the status quo for his literary alter ego in a plot lifted straight from any generic Stallone revenge flick. While working as a middle-man overseeing a ransom drop in a kidnapping case, Burke finds himself the target of an ambush. Left for dead by his attackers, he’s secretively spirited to a hospital, where he doggedly begins a program of physical rehabilitation while stonewalling the police detectives eager to figure out who tried to kill him. Once he’s well enough to move, Burke steals his way out of the hospital and begins hunting down clues. So far, so predictable, right?

  Well, no. This isn’t Get Carter, after all, and Vachss isn’t in the business of penning penny-ante potboilers. Although his Burke books come swaddled in noir trappings, Vachss is no genre hack. In fact, in direct contravention of genre conventions, there are often large stretches where seemingly nothing happens – at least, nothing to gratify fans of fast-paced shoot-em-ups. As in most of the books, Burke spends more time hunkered down, running down leads and ensuring his safety than he does taking care of business.

  "Most people would have a hard time with all the waiting I had to do. Most people weren’t raised in places where patience was one of the few ways you could resist what they were doing to you," Burke surmises in typically flat tones, leavening the adrenaline rush of fear with a cold, methodical practicality.

  Soon, Burke gets down to the business of ferreting out his attackers before they find out he’s still alive. To do so, he turns for help to his "family" of fellow warriors, a rogue’s gallery of street-level characters (among them Michelle, the pre-op transsexual with a heart of gold; Mama, the matronly proprietor of a slovenly Chinese restaurant used as a front for dangerous activities; and Burke’s "brother," Max the Silent, a mute, modern-day Mongol warrior) that would loosen the bladders of the most stalwart Elmore Leonard villain.

  Of course, it’s not all business: Besides having lost an eye and having his appearance dramatically altered, Burke has also lost his beloved mastiff Pansy. Vachss handles this with an icy finality that’s both effective and, at the same time, emotionally unsatisfying for the reader. While it’s entirely plausible that Burke, a lifelong master at the art of shutting off his feelings, can’t allow himself to fully process this brutally shocking turn of events, the matter-of-factness with which his loyal companion is ushered out of the series is off-putting. Of course, that’s how it works in real life, where closure is a long time coming, and Vachss’ refusal to milk the situation for melodrama is commendable.

  After assassinating an expatriate Russian mob figure who helped set him up, Burke begins tracking down the nominal parents of the kidnap victim whose release he was supposedly overseeing. That quest takes him to Chicago, where he teams up with a tough Irish cop named Clancy (and meets blues artist Son Seals in a cameo), and then to Portland and a run-in with some skinheads. Here, Dead and Gone begins to resemble a counter-cultural James Bond thriller, as Burke enlists the aid of Byron, a fellow mercenary from his days fighting in the jungles of Biafra, and Gem, an exotic Cambodian translator who soon proclaims herself Burke’s "wife." Gem follows in a distinctly Ian Fleming tradition of uniquely named paramours (Flood, Belle, Crystal Beth), and the hint of adolescent sex-fantasy, tinged with the slightest whiff of misogyny, is the only real obstacle to the book.

  But Dead and Gone soon proves to be one of Vachss’ most inventive novels, as Burke falls in with a commune/collective of reclusive underground data analysts (a brilliant idea) and uncovers a noxious scheme to set up a sovereign nation serving as a safe haven for child molesters, neo-Nazis and other fringe types. The revelation of Burke’s mysterious antagonist will be satisfying for longtime readers, and Burke’s eventual revenge is nicely executed. All of which makes Dead and Gone, despite a couple of roadblocks, a superior entry in the most compelling noir series going. .