Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shella | 1993 | Andrew Vachss | Buy |
| 2 | The Getaway Man | 2003 | Andrew Vachss | Buy |
| 3 | Two Trains Running | 2005 | Andrew Vachss | Buy |
| 4 | Haiku | 2009 | Andrew Vachss | Buy |
| 5 | Heart Transplant | 2010 | Andrew Vachss | Buy |
| 6 | The Weight | 2010 | Andrew Vachss | Buy |
| 7 | That’s How I Roll | 2012 | Andrew Vachss | Buy |
| 8 | A Bomb Built in Hell | 2012 | Andrew Vachss | Buy |
| 9 | Mortal Lock | 2013 | Andrew Vachss | Buy |
| 10 | Carbon | 2019 | Andrew Vachss | Buy |
| 11 | Blood Line | 2022 | Andrew Vachss | Buy |
Andrew Vachss’s standalone novels cover a range of crime fiction stories outside his recurring series. These eleven books, published between 1993 and 2022, show Vachss working in different modes while keeping his hard-boiled sensibility intact. Shella (1993) was his first standalone, a story about a young woman caught up in a dangerous world. The Getaway Man (2003) follows a wheelman for a crew of armed robbers, told in a spare, propulsive style.
Later standalones include Two Trains Running (2005), a sprawling novel set in a 1959 West Virginia coal town where the mob, the FBI, and local power brokers collide. The Weight (2010) is a lean prison-and-heist story, and That’s How I Roll (2012) is narrated by a death-row inmate. A Bomb Built in Hell was written in the 1970s as Vachss’s first novel but did not see print until 2012. These books let Vachss explore different corners of the criminal world without the ongoing continuity of the Burke series, and several of them rank among his strongest work.