"The baddest noir stylist of them all digs into his archives from the past 15 years and comes up with 20 visits to hell." —Kirkus

A hit man stalks his mark at a race track. A sociopath crosses every moral boundary to become a published author. An ex-mercenary obsessively defends his "perimeter" from a dangerous interloper. A man for hire grudgingly accepts help from a teenage girl to track an online predator. In a dystopian future, young people struggle for survival underground, forming themselves into vicious gangs with only the graffiti of the "last journalists" accepted as truth. Andrew Vachss collects twenty tight, powerful stories—all from the past decade of his career, including some now published for the first time—along with an original screenplay. Together, they form Mortal Lock, a searing portrait of the criminal underworld, with both its depravity and humanity on display.

Stories in Mortal Lock include:

Ghostwriter
Sure Thing
Bloodlines
Passage to Paradise
Veil's Visit (with Joe R. Lansdale)
Dead Reliable
Choice of Weapons
They're All Alike
Half-Breed
Pig
A Piece of the City
Seeding the Ground
As the Crow Flies
Blood Test
Profile
Last Rights
Postwar Boom
La Corazón del Niños
Screenplay: Underground

Check out the other collections of Andrew Vachss' short stories: Born Bad and Everybody Pays.