The Book of Witching
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4.5 • 12 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
A mother must fight for her daughter’s life in this fierce and haunting tale of witchcraft and revenge from the author of A Haunting in the Arctic.
Clem gets a call that is every mother’s worst nightmare. Her nineteen-year-old daughter Erin is unconscious in the hospital after a hiking trip with her friends on the remote Orkney Islands that met a horrifying end, leaving her boyfriend dead and her best friend missing. When Erin wakes, she doesn’t recognize her mother. And she doesn’t answer to her name, but insists she is someone named Nyx.
Clem travels the site of her daughter’s accident, determined to find out what happened to her. The answer may lie in a dark secret in the history of the Orkneys: a woman wrongly accused of witchcraft and murder four centuries ago. Clem begins to wonder if Erin’s strange behavior is a symptom of a broken mind, or the effects of an ancient curse?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This riveting slow-burn thriller from Cooke (A Haunting in the Arctic) connects the sins of the past with the horrors of the present in modern-day Scotland. When Clem gets word that her 19-year-old daughter Erin is unconscious in the burn ward after a trip to the Orkney Islands goes awry, she rushes to Erin's bedside with granddaughter Freya in tow. When Erin wakes and begins speaking in vague but horrifying terms about an incident involving a fire; the death of her boyfriend, Arlo; and the disappearance of her best friend, Senna, the police suspect that Erin might not have simply been a bystander in those events. Clem ventures to the island to investigate along with her estranged ex-husband, Quinn. They uncover a grisly truth connected to something called the Book of Witching and an execution centuries prior that may still be claiming the lives of innocents. Cooke does a nimble job of jumping between the present and 16th-century Scotland, providing lush description and snappy dialogue that brings the story to vivid, brutal life on the way to an ending that masterfully ties the many threads together. The result is certain to satisfy fans of supernatural thrillers.
