[In the following excerpt, Champlin states that despite its "combination of pulpish devices and empurpled rhetoric," Sacrifice is "mesmerizing in its intensity."]

Andrew Vachss is just about the toughest of contemporary crime novelists, a New York lawyer specializing in juvenile justice cases, who exposes his knowledge of the world's darkest side, and his rage at it, in novels that are not so much narratives as fragments of a mosaic of evil. (The present book has 195 fragments, some only a sentence long.) Sacrifice is Vachss' sixth tale of the horrors wrought upon children. This time his ex-con protagonist Burke is trying to help a child so badly abused that he has taken temporary refuge in a second, murderous personality who, or which, has murdered a baby but has no memory of it.

Burke has a circle of helpers that somewhat resembles the gangs who used to abet Doc Savage and the Shadow, including a deaf and speechless Chinese of enormous speed and stealth, a chap called The Prof who speaks in rap, a woman who runs a Chinese restaurant and hates all customers except Burke and his pals, assorted Jamaicans and others. He is haunted by all the friends, including many women, he has lost violently in earlier books.

The combination of pulpish devices and empurpled rhetoric occasionally comes close to defeating Vachss intentions. "This isn't a city. It's a halfway house without a roof. Stressed to critical mass … Fear rules. Politicians promise the people an army of blue-coated street-sweepers for a jungle no chemical could defoliate…. The walls of some buildings still tremble with the molecular memory of baby-bashing violence and incestuous terror."

Yet despite the stressful writing, Vachss waves a powerful light across a city landscape that few writers go near, and none portray so convincingly. It is unpleasant, but it is also mesmerizing in its intensity.