A Bomb Built in Hell

By: Andrew Vachss

Narrated by: Phil Gigante

While doing extended time for killing a fellow prisoner, Wesley meets Carmine Trentoni in a New York state prison. Carmine's life sentence hasn't cut him off from his outside sources, and he sees great potential in Wesley to carry out his revenge. Wesley emerges from prison prepared to be the perfect hit man: calculating, deadly, and driven by money. On his release, Wesley follows Carmine's directions to locate a Mr. Petraglia. Pet and Wesley set up shop in Brooklyn, and execute their assignments with finesse - and occasionally, more explosives than are strictly called for. But Wesley isn't satisfied with his low-profile lot, and sets out to make a mark on the city that everyone will notice - which he does, in a shocking, dynamite conclusion.

©2012 Andrew Vachss (P)2012 Dreamscape Media, LLC

vachass writing

the end to horrific the story is missing Burke and pansy prof max the silent mama

A Real Mind F%#*

Well written. The most realistic hit man book ever. Deeply disturbing. Great character development. Graphic violence.

There is no Reason for this Book to Exist 0 stars

This is the second Vachss book I bought. The first, Strega, a Burke Novel, was pretty bad, but not intolerable. I decided that I'd probably skip the Burke series and try another of his (generally) highly rated novels. Thus:

A Bomb Built in Hell - A truly horrible novel.

In essence, this is a biography of a very sick human (though I use that word advisedly).

He is a sociopath and is not even remotely likeable in any way. It is not entertaining. While the writing is OK, no amount of decent writing can overcome the garbage content. Even those who can handle extreme violence will find no comfort here.

The book starts early with killings and lots of violence... then continues with more killing and worse violence.

For six hours, I kept looking for any reason justifying Wesley's psychotic and super violent behavior. None. Absolutely NONE! He simply kills everyone, innocents included, throughout the book.

Even when he murders for a "reason" this is not vigilante stuff (which I can handle). Wesley is not only unlikeable from ANY viewpoint, he has no reason whatsoever to exist, and should have been removed from the chessboard at birth.

I bought this because of the generally positive reviews on Amazon, often a good source of reviews from those buying the print version. They let me down.

Other than the superb performance by Gigante (one of his best BTW), this is just trash. I bet he spent a long time in the shower after recording this thing.

I suggest you not even think a moment about spending your $$$ or a credit on this pap.

It is 100% junk "literature". Again... save your $$$.