Little Girl Blue — David Cray

Everything changes for Lieutenant Julia Brennan, NYPD, on a frigid January morning in Central Park. The commander of a Manhattan North homicide squad, she inspects the body of an unidentified young girl. Naked, her skin blue from the cold, her feet cut and scraped in desperate flight, the grim sight of the dead child in an instant turns Julia Brennan's priorities upside down. Julia Brennan is tough-minded and hard-boiled, like the story this taut, chilling novel unfolds. Yet she suddenly finds herself willing to risk her promotion and, if necessary, her entire career to give a woefully lost child a name and to apprehend the parties responsible for an appalling crime. Her search takes her into the world of pedophiles and foreign adoption agencies that sell children into slavery -- a world where, Julia begins to realize, someone has the jump on her, and is killing the very suspects she is hunting. Striking a devil's bargain with an undercover cop from the Sex Crimes Unit, a man who himself becomes a prime candidate for the killer, Julia follows a tortuous path until, alone and dismayed, she sees that she has made a terrible, terrible mistake. Now she faces her greatest fear. For Lieutenant Julia Brennan is also the mother of a young daughter.