Sacrifice

What — or who — could turn a gifted little boy into a murderous thing that calls itself "Satan’s Child"? In search of an answer, a man named Burke travels from a festering welfare hotel to a neat frame house where a voodoo priestess presides over a congregation of assassins. For this vigilante and unlicensed private eye has made it his business to defend the small victims whom the law has failed — even a child who has been made into a killer. Gripping and chillingly knowledgeable about the mechanisms of evil, Sacrifice is a thriller of savage authority from one of the best crime writers of our generation. "Vachss is a contemporary master. . . . Decidedly hard-boiled, his prose is as lean, tough-edged and brittle as the man who is his protagonist." — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution "A harrowing tale in which outcasts are the moral heroes, and the people who belong to civilization are corrupt. . . . An absolute original. . . . Andrew Vachss has become a cult favorite, and for good reason." — Cosmopolitan