ONE SMALL SACRIFICE

A capable but jaded NYPD detective questions whether a dangerous
killer is picking off his romantic partners one by one—or whether someone else
is getting away with murder.

When Alex Traynor’s fiancee, Emily, goes missing, Detective Sheryn
Sterling feels partly responsible. After all, when another woman connected to
Alex died the previous year after falling off a roof, she was sure he was
guilty—but she could never find enough evidence to put him away. Alex might be
an award-winning photojournalist, but his years spent bearing witness to the
horrors of war have given him PTSD, and Sheryn knows from personal experience
that this demon can make rational people do terrible, violent things. As the
investigation into Emily’s disappearance deepens, Sheryn and her new partner
find themselves going back over the previous case as well. It’s possible that
there’s a darker story there and that Alex isn’t the only one with secrets. The
novel changes third-person perspectives in each chapter, giving insight and
development to a handful of different characters, which allows for several
characters to become multifaceted throughout the novel. There is an immediate
relevance to Alex’s struggles with PTSD as well as to Sheryn’s concern that her
beloved former (retired) partner’s casual bigotry might have had some effect on
how they approached their job. An additional plot thread involving both opioid
addiction and illegal prescriptions also rings sadly current. Overall,
Davidson’s (Blood Always Tells, 2014, etc.) plot doesn’t offer anything
groundbreakingly new or unfamiliar, but it’s easy to get drawn deeply into the
various motives and secrets of each character because it’s so perfectly human
for all of us to keep things hidden, even from those we love.

A thoughtfully plotted and skillfully characterized procedural
mystery—and, it appears, the first in a new series.