SOURCE: "Children's Crusaders," in Washington Post Book World, Vol. XXV, No. 52, December 24, 1995, pp. 5, 10.

In the following review, Womack criticizes Vachss's work, likening Footsteps of the Hawk to drinking "near-beer," and faulting Batman: The Ultimate Evil for its comic-book style conventions.

Andrew Vachss has good intentions, surely. For years he has devoted himself to the defense of children against adults who would wreak physical and sexual harm upon them. In his fiction, Vachss's men and women—solitary, suspicious, stoic—tend to bear the scars of such abuse. Depicting the convoluted ways in which their childhood traumas haunt them in adult life often enables him to introduce into his plots an emotional resonance otherwise undeserved. Often; not always.

In Footsteps of the Hawk, Burke, Vachss's ex-con protagonist from his earlier Down in the Zero, finds himself squeezed by two New York cops as he tries to ascertain which one is...