Sacrifice

Andrew Vachss' brilliant, steel-edged anti-hero--the P.I. called Burke--is back on familiar ground: the hellish lower depths of New York City, where child abuse is just the generic term for a hundred unfathomable brands of emotional and physical cruelty. Burke stumbles on a brand that's new even to him when he discovers a child whose monstrousness has been "created" by a true monster.
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.