The Sacrifice takes place in London, a year after a worldwide sickness has infected adults, turning them into something akin to voracious, cannibalistic zombies, and begins five days after the end of The Fear.

She tricks the two boys into believing that Jordan and Ed want to imprison them, and offers to take them across the city to find Ella, which they accept.

Eventually, Matt locks the Kid inside a cage, deciding to feed him to a zombie the people at the Cathedral call Wormwood.

Whilst Matt barricades himself inside the Cathedral with the rest of his followers, Wormwood helps Ed's group escape by communicating telepathically with the zombies.

Shadowman runs into Ed's crew and takes them to a safe hiding spot, where he reveals his real name: Dylan Peake.

Ava Ehde from Voice of Youth Advocates called the novel suspenseful and a "horrifying page-turner", and described the prose as solid and sometimes brilliant.

[5] Daniel Kraus from Booklist described that the new character Wormwood was thrilling, but commented that there was "not much to differentiate teen leader Ed's subsequent rescue operation from similar sequences in previous volumes, and one is tempted to say the series is starting to generate diminishing returns".