Cal is a recently widowed single father who has just moved to New York City with his six-year-old son, Chris. In Central Park one day they come across the remnants of some kind of ritual that involved animal sacrifice.

Chris finds an interesting shell at the site and brings it home. Then he starts being able to communicate with the spirit of his dead mother and also has some other mysterious things going on.

There are a few crucial coincidences in this story and one of the two most coincidenty coincidences gets Cal involved in studying voodoo and how this religion is still being practiced in a modern urban setting.

He soon discovers that there's been a series of child murders in the city, and these, too, are ritual sacrifices that can be traced to some voodoo traditions.

Cal is an anthropologist and thus well placed to learn about a different culture's beliefs and practices, as well as to keep a rational objectivity.

Up to a point.

One of Condé's neat tricks is to present both Cal and the reader with examples of real voodoo magic actually working, whether it's casting spells or communicating with the dead, and then usually also gesturing in another direction to a plausible non-supernatural explanation.

It's a tightrope walk for Cal, who eventually falls off and becomes a believer—or at least half of him does.

It turns out that the human sacrifices are being performed by, more or less, the good guys, who are trying to win the favor of their seven gods in order to present the destruction of the entire world by nuclear armageddon.

The seventh and final sacrifice is, of course, Cal's son, Chris, a fact foreshadowed by Chris's sudden interest in the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac.

To save his son, Cal has to fight voodoo with voodoo. But if he succeeds, does he doom humanity?

This tension is sustained and developed and the novel is a well paced read, though it did ocassionally try my patience with some of Cal's wheel-spinning.

But it's certainly a really good horror thriller and has quite an ending.

The first line is "'Look, Daddy,' Chris Jamison said as he ran up holding out his open palm".