I've been on a dual-timeline narrative bender lately (see my review of The Lake House), so I picked up a copy of A Witch in Time at Barnes&Noble on a weekend trip just before the coronavirus pandemic hit. The protagonist is Helen Lambert, a high-powered DC publisher, who is reeling from a recent divorce and... Continue Reading →
City of Light, City of Poison by Holly Tucker
Holly Tucker's non-fiction book City of Light, City of Poison documents a lesser-known period of French history. A hundred years before the French Revolution, Louis XIV presided over another turbulent era and made efforts to establish the first system of law enforcement in the country. In the second half of the 17th century, Paris was a place... Continue Reading →
The Witch’s Trinity by Erika Mailman
The Witch's Trinity spent a good couple of years on my TBR list, and I am so glad I finally got to it. Transporting the reader into late medieval Germany, it tackles the fascinating and terrifying topic of witch trials and the social, economic and religious structures that made them possible. During the winter of... Continue Reading →
Genealogy Research Leads to a Novel about Infamous Puritan
Guest blog by Donna Gawell In the Shadow of Salem is the story of an infamous Puritan, Mehitabel Braybrooke. Her life didn’t start out well, and history books and town records have not been kind. Mehitabel was an illegitimate child of a servant and a prosperous landowner, Richard Braybrooke. Both parents were whipped for the... Continue Reading →
One Church, Twenty-Five ‘Witches’ and a Thousand Skeletons
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to write more about historical places I visit (and not just historical novels I read). In that spirit I am offering a post about the Kirk of St. Nicholas in Aberdeen, Scotland, which I visited on New Year’s Eve 2017. Originally founded in the 1150s, it is a... Continue Reading →
The Witchfinder’s Sister by Beth Underdown
The year is 1645 and England has been mired in a civil war for 4 years; but as men are dying in prisons and in armed encounters, in the county of Suffolk a self-appointed witch hunter is unleashing terror of a different kind. Based on a true story, The Witchfinder’s Sister by Beth Underdown, tells... Continue Reading →