Two Trains Running - Softcover

Vachss, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1400079381 ISBN 13: 9781400079384

Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2006

Synopsis

In his most original and compelling book yet, Andrew Vachss presents an electrifying tale of corruption in a devastated mill town.  It is 1959--a moment in history when the clandestine, powerful forces that will shape America to the present day are about to collide.Walker Dett is a hired gun, known for using the most extreme measures to accomplish his missions. Royal Beaumont is the "hillbilly boss" who turned Locke City from a dying town into a thriving vice capital. But organized crime outsiders are moving in on Beaumont's turf, so he reaches out for Dett in a high-risk move to maintain his power at all costs. Add a rival Irish political machine, a deeply entrenched neo-Nazi "party", the nascent black power movement, turf-disputing juvenile gangs, a muck-raking journalist who doubles as a blackmailer, the FBI--a covert observer and occasional participant which may itself be under surveillance-- and Locke City is about as stable as a nitroglycerin truck stalled on the railroad tracks.

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Review

Amazon.com Exclusive Content

Justice, Rage, Retribution & Vachss
Best known for his series about Burke, a career criminal with a uniquely larcenous family, Andrew Vachss has penned a standalone novel sure to win new fans and delight those familiar with his earlier works. Set in the year 1959, Two Trains Running is a complex moral tale of family, violence, love, and atonement. Read our Amazon.com exclusive interview with Vachss.

Two Trains Running was selected by Amazon.com as their No. 1 Editors' Pick in Mystery & Thrillers for 2005.

Standalone Novels, Comics & Collections by Andrew Vachss

Shella	The Getaway Man	Everybody Pays: Stories
Born Bad: Collected Stories	Another Chance to Get It Right	Hard Looks: Adapted Stories

See all titles by Andrew Vachss.

The Burke Series

Flood	Strega	Blue Belle
Hard Candy	Blossom	Sacrifice

See the entire Burke series.

From the Inside Flap

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1400079381
• ISBN 13: 9781400079384
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464