When she alleges that she was kidnapped, assaulted, and left for dead by a group of white police officers, her cause is taken up by an ambitious and unscrupulous civil rights activist and his lawyer brother, despite evidence of deceit in her story.

The events of the novel are based on the real-life Tawana Brawley case, and takes place in a part of New Jersey still suffering from the aftermath of post-war deindustrialization and the 1967 Newark riots.

A month after Sybilla was discovered, word of the alleged attack reaches the ears of Marus Mudrick, a Black preacher and prominent civil rights activist.

Mudrick quickly drums up outrage over the attack and the inaction of the Pascayne police, with the hesitant support of his twin brother Byron, a respectable lawyer with a milder temperament who somewhat resents Marus's success.

[4] Several of her previous books were based on real-life events, notably Blonde, about Marilyn Monroe, and Black Water, a roman à clef that parallels the Chappaquiddick incident.

[8] On November 28, 1987, Tawana Brawley, a 15-year Black girl who had been missing for four days, was found, alive, in a plastic garbage bag outside an apartment where she had lived in Wappingers Falls in the U.S. state of New York.

Brawley's case was taken up and brought to national attention by civil rights activist Al Sharpton (assisted by lawyers Alton H. Maddox and C. Vernon Mason), who alleged a large-scale cover-up.

[13] A central theme of the novel is how individual people and events are transformed into symbols and "are made to surrender their unique complexities as human beings", sometimes resulting in the obfuscation of facts in service of a larger purpose.

[16] In an academic review, Eric K. Anderson links The Sacrifice to Oates's earlier novel Them and its "understanding of how specific incidents of racial conflict cannot be viewed only in isolation".

[3] A review in The Independent found that the novel depicts the "powerless of women" in a male world, and "simmers with barely concealed rage at the impotence inflicted on people by race and gender inequalities".

[11] Kirkus Reviews found that the multiple perspectives employed by the novel failed to offer "nuance or fresh insights", and concluded that "Oates revives an old scandal without making it new.

noted that Oates's engagement with "the subjects of race, violence and socioeconomic status" has had only "intermittent success" and that The Sacrifice in particular was "marred by a lack of empathy and worse".

[4] In a review for National Public Radio, Alan Cheuse was more positive, calling the novel a "raw and earnest work of fiction [that] offers a mix of fiery drama and the cold bone truths of race as we all live it today.

"[7] Lesley McDowell's review in The Independent praised it as a "superb" synthesis of the themes of sexual violence and racial prejudice written in her "characteristic visceral and hypnotising style".