Vachss has always been one of the best and most creative authors of the thriller genre, with characters that leap off the page and story lines that threaten to break the reader's heart (e.g., Blue Belle, LJ 10/1/88). But the present work, though basically well crafted, has only brief flashes of Vachss's fine talent. Burke befriends those involved in a women's shelter and finds rogue government agents and a neo-Nazi group that plans to blow up federal buildings. He saves the day with the help of his friends: mute Max, Chinese terror "Mama," genius Mole, "Baby Sister" Michelle, and, of course, his beloved mastiff, Pansy. But what is lacking here is the bite of Vachss's earlier works, the toughness and brutality that have won him so many fans. Buy this for diehards. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/97.]Alice DiNizo, Raritan P.L., N.J.

A big dumb blond -- a muscle-bound prison friend named Hercules -- needs Burke's help. Hired to lean on a stalker and scare him off his victim, Herk has inadvertently murdered the mark. Obligation and honor demand that Burke and his tribe of urban warriors do their best to pull the lug out of a bad situation. Looking to discover more about the set-up that ensnared his friend, Burke quickly signs on with Crystal Beth, the woman who had hired Herk and who runs a shadowy network that protects abused women. His job starts out as protection for a woman being stalked by her neo-Nazi husband. Nothing is easy in Burke's life or Vachss's fiction and the stalker turns out to have a powerful protector himself. Soon Burke and Herk and everyone else are dealing with white supremacists ready to explosively bring down democracy .. Vachss plots this one as tight as a hooker's skirt and as smooth as a pimp's promises. His commanding characterization makes Burke so cold he's hot and the supporting crew is just as compelling. Safe House is packed with scintillating style, indelible imagery, and intense empathy -- maybe the best yet from a writer of raw power and passionate fervor.
— horroronline

Child-abuse specialist Burke expands his righteous field of operations—his one-man harrowing of our modern cityscape—to cover an Aryan supremacist network of terrorists. Not by design, of course. Burke and his ragtag band of urban avengers—Clarence, the Prof, the Mole, Max the Silent—start off much closer to their usual turf, on a self-ordained mission to take down domestic abusers who've turned into stalkers of their terrified women. Their eye-for-an-eye campaign leads them to Crystal Beth, who runs a shelter for women who have nowhere else to go. Vachss (False Allegations, 1996, etc.) establishes the safe house's credentials by admitting testimony from its desperate clients: the rape victim whose husband keep raping her "because I owed him"; the S/M player whose latest playmate refused to quit the game; the cyber-chump who was seduced by a predator who disseminated a falsely heroic image of himself over the Internet; the porn star whose most reverential fan had turned into an obsessive erotomaniac. But no story is more heartrending than that of hugely pregnant Marla, whose white-supremacist husband Lothar Bucholtz (born Larry Bretton, a name he jettisoned because it sounded too Jewish) is waiting for her to deliver the son he's already named Gerhardt so that he can spirit him off to his coven of neo-Nazis. When Burke and Co. try to move against Lothar, they run up against a brick wall named Pryce, who tells them Lothar can't be touched. It doesn't take long for Burke to work out the reason why: Lothar is the designated informant who's going to bring down his pack of bombing buddies, and custody of Gerhardt, along with immunity for his earlier peccadilloes,is part of the price the US government has included in his severance package. A lesser crew of vigilantes would be stymied at this point, but the scheme Burke hatches to take Lothar down is a thing of beauty. Think of a lesser James Bond adventure, minus the high-tech gadgetry and the rules.