|
Electrifying, compelling, and ultimately
terrifying, Two Trains Running is a galvanizing evocation
of that moment in our history when the violent forces that
would determine America’s future were just beginning
to roil below the surface.
Once a devastated mill town, by 1959 Locke City has established
itself as a thriving center of vice tourism. The city is controlled
by boss Royal Beaumont, who took it by force many years ago
and has held it against all comers since.
Now his domain is being threatened by an invading crime syndicate.
But in a town where crime and politics are virtually indivisible,
there are other players awaiting their turn onstage. Emmett
Till’s lynching has inflamed a nascent black revolutionary
movement. A neo-Nazi organization is preparing for race war.
Juvenile gangs are locked in a death struggle over useless
pieces of “turf.” And some shadowy group is supplying
them all with weapons. With an IRA unit and a Mafia family
also vying for local supremacy, it’s no surprise that
the whole town is under FBI surveillance. But that agency
is being watched, too.
Beaumont ups the ante by importing a hired killer, Walker
Dett, a master tactician whose trademark is wholesale destruction.
But there are a number of wild cards in this game, including
Jimmy Procter, an investigative reporter whose tools include
stealth, favor-trading, and blackmail, and Sherman Layne,
the one clean Locke City cop, whose informants range from
an obsessed “watcher” who patrols the edge of
the forest, where cars park for only one reason, to the madam
of the county’s most expensive bordello. But Layne is
guarding a secret of his own, one that could destroy more
than his career. Even the most innocent are drawn into the
ultimate-stakes game–like Tussy Chambers, the beautiful
waitress whose mystically deep connection with Walker Dett
might inadvertently ignite the whole combustible mix.
In a stunning departure from his usual territory, Andrew Vachss
gives us a masterful novel that is also an epic story of postwar
America. Not since Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest has
there been as searing a portrait of corruption in a small
town. This is Vachss’s most ambitious, innovative, and
explosive work yet.
Andrew Vachss has been a federal
investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, a social services
caseworker, and a labor organizer and has directed a maximum-security
prison for youthful offenders. Now a lawyer in private practice,
he represents children and youths exclusively. He is the author
of numerous novels, including the Burke series, two collections
of short stories, and a wide variety of other material including
song lyrics, graphic novels, and a "children's book for
adults." His books have been translated into twenty languages
and his work has appeared in Parade, Antaeus,
Esquire, Playboy, the New York Times,
and numerous other forums. A native New Yorker, he now divides
his time between the city of his birth and the Pacific Northwest.
The dedicated Web site for Vachss and his work is www.vachss.com.
|
