Burke is an ex-con with many ways of earning a buck and his own code of honor: he only does private eye work if the money and the client are right. Strega is an icy, beautiful Mafia princess who offers Burke money and sex to find a piece of kiddie porn. Burke agrees and hits the streets with his bizarre friends to plunge into the nightmarish world of child abuse.
Andrew Vachss's implacable private eye has a new client, Strega. She wants Burke to find an obscene photograph--and that search will take him into the ocean that flows just beneath the city, an ocean whose currents are flesh and money, the anguish of children and the pleasure of twisted adults. It is a place that Burke can visit only at the risk of his sanity and his life. But between the power of Strega and his own sense of justice, there is no turning back.

In Strega one of our most acclaimed crime writers gives us a thriller that might have been imagined by Dante. For this is a tour of hell with no stops left out, conducted by a novelist who writes with the authority of the damned.