Aftershock Series

Once a mercenary, later an assassin, and now struggling to maintain a peaceful life, Dell is marked by marrow-deep loyalty and no-limit protective instincts for his wife, Dolly, a former battlefield nurse. When Dolly enters the fray of a neighborhood dispute and receives a thinly veiled threat for her trouble, Dell instantly reverts to guerrilla tactics. His target is George Byron Benton, a prominent local figure who pushes an inscrutable agenda with the deadly patience of a Gila monster—and whose public life may all be an elaborate disguise. Dell is quickly down to cold objectives: decode Benton’s end-game, calculate the tactics needed to recapture Dolly’s stolen sense of security . . . and execute.

With Andrew Vachss’s trademark razor-sharp dialogue and inimitable prose style, SignWave—the final entry in the Aftershock trilogy—is guaranteed to reverberate powerfully long after it has been read.

Dell, a former mercenary, and his wife, Dolly, once a battlefield nurse, believe they have finally found peace in a deceptively idyllic town on the Oregon coast. Until early one morning, when a body washes up on the town’s pristine beach. But this no accidental drowning–the corpse is covered with neo-Nazi tattoos . . . and the skull has been fractured with a spike.
 
Eager to close the case before it can hurt tourism, the jumpy D.A. arrests Homer, a harmless schizophrenic whose wristwatch–a gift from God, he says–is engraved with a symbol that exactly matches one of the dead man’s tattoos. Mack, the director and sole employee of the local mental-health outreach program, is outraged but helpless. He confides in Dolly, who, with her local connections and her husband’s ruthless skills, is anything but. As the search for the real killer pulls them deeper into the world of hate groups, Dell and Mack together discover the treasonous fog of evil that hovers not only above their town but also above America itself.
 
With this latest installment in his new Aftershock series, Andrew Vachss reminds us once again–in his inimitable, visceral prose-that for some, peace comes at a very high price.

FIRST IN A NEW SERIES

Dell, an ex-Legionnaire was working as a mercenary when he first saw Dolly, a nurse with Médecins Sans Frontières. When they later married, Dell abandoned his work, and Dolly shed her identity. But not her calling—she became a teacher, confidant, and defender of dozens of teenagers in their Coastal Oregon village. When the star softball pitcher guns down a popular boy on the last day of school, Dolly knows this is no ”school shooting”. She goes all-in to protect ”Mighty Mary” McCoy, even to the extent of unleashing her lethal husband.

As Dolly uses her contacts to gain access to medical secrets, Dell returns to his no-boundaries past. Using guile, extortion, shadow networks–and, finally, an act of terrorism—he uncovers the secret MaryLou was willing to sacrifice her own life to protect . . . a soul-killing rite of passage demanded of the town’s most vulnerable girls, with her baby sister next on that list.