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Summary
Summary
"Burke. Ex-con. Mercenary. Urban survivalist. Career criminal. Scar-carrying member of that vast underground tribe, Children of the Secret. And, some whisper, the city's finest hunter of predators. Perhaps because he was spawned from the same seed." "Burke is a man for hire. And Bondi is a private dancer, performing on command her special routine on a high-tech stage. When she learns who's really watching, she wants to buy some revenge - or so she says. Her snake-hipped trail leads to an obsessed enforcer named Heather, and her boss, Kite, who blackmails Burke into taking on an ugly job of investigation. Kite is a professional debunker, specializing in allegations of child sexual abuse. "False" allegations, he says. Witch hunts. But now he may have stumbled across the case of his career - the real thing. And he needs a man who knows something about witches. He finds Burke." "Dark, edgy, unflinching, False Allegations is Andrew Vachss reporting from ground zero...and Burke at his most dangerous."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author Notes
Hardboiled writer Andrew Henry Vachss was born on October 19, 1942 in New York City. He attended Case Western Reserve University and the New England School of Law.
Vachss has worked in many government and law enforcement organizations, ranging from the U. S. Public Health Service to the New York City Juvenile Justice Planning Project.
Vachss' work as a writer includes a series of books featuring an unlicensed private detective named Burke. Burke's appearances include Flood, Strega, Blue Belle, Hard Candy, Blossom and Sacrifice. Vachss has also written comic books and graphic novels.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Each of Vachss's 10 previous novels has dealt with child abuse, but he's worked other themes as well, most notably the volatility of love and the hypocrisies of the middle class. Judging by his darkly disturbing Batman novel of last year (Batman: The Ultimate Evil), however, and by this shard of a thriller, his literary vision seems now to have tunneled down to sight only child abuse and allied issues in its crosshairs. Here, Vachss takes aim at adolescent sexual abuse and at those who would debunk all cases of recovered-memory syndrome as he proselytizes for the work of the real-life Dr. Bruce Perry, head of the Civitas ChildTrauma programs in Houston (who appears as a character). The story begins when Vachss's urban outlaw, Burke, initially hired by an erotic dancer named Bondi to rob a voyeuristic pervert, smells a set-up. He's not wrongcareful investigation leads him to Kite, an albino lawyer who specializes in debunking recovered memories of child sexual abuse, either demolishing the witnesses' credibility or getting the cases thrown out of court. Now Kite wants to represent one Jennifer Dalton, a high-profile client whose story, if true, will bring the issue to national attention. Kite hires Burke to interview the alleged victim and pronounce her story true or false. This quest brings him to Dr. Perry, who is pioneering laboratoryas compared to clinical couchinvestigation of recovered memory syndrome. There are a few side glances (notably at the spectacular end of Burke's ongoing gin game with Max the Silent and at the results of his "sister" Michelle's long-delayed sex-change operation), and Vachss's consideration of the validity of recovered memory syndrome is informed and balanced, but his glare at child sexual abuse here is nearly relentless and, eventually, wearisome. Vachss's prey is certainly worth hunting, and he's a skillful hunter, able through his stiletto prose and his white-hot rage to persuade readers that Burke's vigilantism equals justice. Still, there's more to life and more to art than avenging the innocentand early in his writing career, when he was writing his finest novels (Flood; Strega; Blue Bell), Vachss seemed to know that. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Kite is a lawyer, with an agenda: he wants to weed out false allegations of child abuse, not only because justice demands it, but also because bogus charges muddy the waters for genuine abuse victims. He hires Burke to do deep background on Jennifer Dalton, a young woman who claims she was molested as a young girl by Brother Jacob, a church deacon. Unfortunately, Burke's investigation concludes that Jennifer was abused by Brother Dalton and that she was not the only victim. On the verge of Brother Jacob's conviction, however, Jennifer recants, claiming it was all a lie. But Burke smells a rat; the story is not over. With this novel, Vachss, a lawyer who represents abused children, continues his rejuvenation of the Burke series. While he continues to use the series as a vehicle to promote his message regarding the horrors of child abuse, a Burke novel is no longer a black descent into existential hell. Burke's world is hell, to be sure, but at least now it's tempered with a bit of humor and some affection between its denizens. While still thought-provoking and distrubing, the Burke series can now claim to be genuinely entertaining as well. (Reviewed Sept. 1, 1996)0679451099Wes Lukowsky
Kirkus Review
Child-abuse specialist Burke (Footsteps of the Hawk, 1995, etc.) is hired for a unique assignment: to see if he can disprove an accuser's allegations of childhood abuse. Not exactly Burke's territory, you say? No, and he doesn't get into it very straightforwardly either. A working girl who's been hired to do specialty dances for an unseen voyeur in a neighboring high-rise leads him to a shady dealmaker who leads him in turn to Kite, the albino lawyer whose mission is to debunk the ``Fabrication for Secondary Gain Syndrome''--falsely ``recovered'' allegations of long-ago child abuse concocted for money or power. In order to disprove the canard that ``kids never lie about child sexual abuse,'' Kite has to be able to show which kids are lying and which aren't--which means that before he goes public with his counter-accusations about bogus repressed memories, he needs to establish his own credibility by backing one victim who demonstrably isn't lying. To make sure this victim's story is ironclad, this devil's advocate needs a devil's advocate of his own. And that's where Burke comes in--as another seeker of truth who'll do everything he can to impeach Jennifer Dalton's story about Brother Jacob, the Psalmist clergyman she now says molested her as a child, in order to make sure she's really telling the truth. Having set up this elaborate array of wheels within wheels, Vachss does surprisingly little with it. After the tour of the usual stinking fleshpots that brought him to Kite in the first place, Burke's investigation of Jennifer's story--two parts routine background checks, one part blackmail of Brother Jacob, one part consultation with real-life brain-trauma specialist Dr. Bruce Perry--is disappointingly anticlimactic. So is the climactic final twist, which every reader not suffering from post-traumatic amnesia will see coming long before Burke does. Vachss has never sacrificed fictional interest to muckraking as zealously as he does here.
Library Journal Review
Burke is back, blackmailed into dealing with allegations of child sexual abuse . (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
