Burke receives a call from a teenager frightened for his life. The boy’s mother is one of Burke’s ghosts, and he feels at least a minor debt to the past. The way the boy tells it, his friends in the Connecticut rich-kid set are dying at their own hands: a series of inexplicable suicides only shortly after they leave a local psychiatric hospital. The boy - Randy - is now fearful for his own life. What Burke finds in those over-privileged mansions and clubs is both a confused and confusing message.

Most readers, like Burke himself, will find it hard to sympathise that much with the suicides of Down in the Zero. These are anti-slackers; kids who do nothing not because they chose to but simply because their parents have the wherewithal to let them. The alacrity with which they embrace racing souped-up cars and partying is alarming, and leaves barely a hairsbreadth for Vachss to slip in a vote of sympathy. As it happens, he is reduced to elevating Randy above his contemporaries as more empathetic and down to earth to prevent us from treating any potential suicide on his part as consequential in the grand scheme.

But then it’s clear that the kids are for once almost superfluous to a Vachss novel. Burke is soon involved with Fancy, a sexually gregarious young woman who hands out sadistic punishments to her clients, but to the avenging New Yorker is willing to chance her own chosen role as the willing submissive. This makes for uneasy reading. Fancy allows herself to be used and abused by the man, from telling her what to wear, to how and where he will condescend to have sex with her. From Burke’s point of view, we the readers are able to accept the discipline as something Fancy chooses for herself, and even Burke as initially unwilling conspirator, but by the end, as he settles to the role rather too comfortably, the book in turn becoming a potent but queasy ride.

Naturally, this being the crusading, Oprah-friendly Vachss, child-abuse (real child-abuse) must inevitably raise it’s ugly head, and Burke tracks down the root cause of Fancy’s complex sexuality to her dead father’s abuse of both of his daughters years before. This is the most successful portion of the novel. Less so are the initial suicides, which seem almost forgotten for too much of the book. The resolution (it draws in Israeli security, secret cameras and blackmail) seems perfunctory and almost trite in comparison to most of Vachss’ work.

Down in the Zero is a book of two-halves that, unusually, the author seems unable to reconcile. If he is telling us that rich-kids suffer too, his point is made, but with none of the force, none of empathy that he finds in novels like Hard Candy or Sacrifice. Like it’s central character, the book stares into the abyss of the Zero, but unlike him, seems unable to find any light on the other side.