Shella

In his new novel Andrew Vachss moves beyond his powerful evocations of the private eye as pursuer and scourge of the evildoer. Now, in Sheila, he explores the making of evil - the depths beneath the lower depths of American society and the terrifying products of that netherworld where children are born into ultimate abandonment and abuse, where only a few survive and some emerge not fully human. One such survivor is the man known as Ghost. His personality has been formed, diamond-hard, in the crucible of chilly orphanages and hellish juvenile prisons. He has grown the way a baby alligator grows - in size alone, not in essence. He has no experience of nurture or education. He has become an instrument. A weapon to be used by predators. He works only with his hands. His work - his art - is killing. He is a superb killer: imaginative, efficient, precise, cold. He easily finds employment. When he does time, he emerges from prison neither hurt nor healed - exactly as before. But now he is no longer drifting. He has a mission that enlists all his banked energies: to track the woman who calls herself Sheila. She is a runway dancer. She is, like himself, a survivor of her own destruction, kept alive by anger. But Ghost knows that she has, for an instant, glimpsed the man behind the steel mask he wears, and that she is as astonished as he to find someone to connect with. Sheila has disappeared. And Ghost - desperate to reconnect - discovers the only route that might lead him back to her: straight through the cruel alleys, the topless bars, the dark tunnels of pornography and prostitution, into the raging center of a neo-Nazi enclave whose leader is instantly drawn to him... Sheila is the story ofa killer stalking his destined prey, driven by forces he cannot understand. It is the story of a man searching for a witness to his own humanity.