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.
Praise for Andrew Vachss and SignWave
“Vachss seems bottomlessly knowledgeable about the depth and variety of human twistedness.” —The New York Times
“Vachss’s writing is like a dark rollercoaster ride of fear, love, and hate.” —The Times-Picayune
“An extended meditation on what Dell aptly calls ‘the zen of violence’. . . . Fans of the series will lose sleep.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Entertaining. . . . Lots of assassin lessons and killing lore make turning the pages a learning experience in the dark arts as much as a riveting read.” —Publishers Weekly
“[Vachss] writes a hypnotically violent prose made up of equal parts of broken concrete block and razor wire.” —Chicago Sun-Times
“To read Andrews Vachss at his best is to take a ride on the dark side, where the plight of the oppressed and vulnerable . . . becomes the catalyst for revenge-fueled street justice.” —Los Angeles Times
“Andrew Vachss is unique among modern writers; no one else comes close to the raw power and intellectual ambiguity that he manifests so elegantly, so coldly.” —The Clarion-Ledger
“There is no other living American author with prose as razor-clean as Andrew Vachss, and there is no other writer willing to go so far into such dark extremes, either. When Vachss turns the juice on, the bad guys sizzle.” —The Austin Chronicle
“Vachss is red-hot and as serious as a punctured lung.” —Playboy
“There’s no way to put a [Vachss book] down once you’ve begun. . . . The one-liners pierce like bullets.” —Detroit Free Press
“Vachss explores the horrific intersection of victims and victimizers, evil and avengers. The setting has moved from urban to small-town, but the eternal conflict is as it ever was.” —Booklist
“Razor-edged and compulsively readable; the pages fly by.” —Library Journal
“Vachss impresses again with his new dark and compelling thriller.” —Largehearted Boy.com
“Many writers try to cover the same ground as Vachss. A handful are as good. None are better.” —People
