Everything changes for Lieutenant Julia Brennan, NYPD, on a 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 as if from desperate flight, the grim sight of the dead child in an instant turns Brennan's priorities upside down. Brennan is tough-minded, but suddenly she 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 paedophiles and foreign adoption agencies that sell children into slavery - a world where, Julia begins to realise, someone is way ahead of her, and is killing off the very suspects she is tracking down. Striking a devil's bargain with an undercover cop from the Sex Crimes unit, a man with a troubled past, Julia follows a tortuous path until, alone and dismayed, she sees that she has made a terrible mistake. Now she faces her greatest fear. For Lieutenant Julia Brennan is also a mother, and no one means more to her than her young daughter...