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?

I have always been obsessed with books about witches and/or magic. I remember when I first heard about the Salem witch trials when I was in elementary school and being transfixed because not only were witches real, but they were bad and evil and had to be stopped by the Puritans lest we be corrupted and endangered. And then, I grew older and learned the truth behind these (and other) witch trials, which is when my faith in humanity began to decline. I call this out because this book only helps illustrate the latter.

This novel is set in Scotland and alternates between the present day and the late 1500s. In the present timeline, a woman named Clem has just learned that her daughter, Erin, has been found on a beach clinging to life, covered in burns. One of the friends she was with was found burned to death on the same beach, and another of her friends is missing. When Erin awakens, and the police begin to question her, she is very combative, has no idea who her mother is, and claims that her name is Nyx.

In the late 1500s, a woman named Alison is part of a clan known as the Triskele – the oldest clan of magic wielders in the area. These clans were pretty common back then, but as Christianity spread, anyone who wouldn’t accept Christianity was considered a servant of the devil and wiped out. When Alison is asked to help heal a man, she obliges, but when the man comes back asking for her help in cursing someone to death, she refuses. It’s not long before Alison finds herself taken into custody and accused of witchcraft by this same man, and he (and his cronies) will do everything they can to make her confess in order to push their agenda.

As the book progresses, we see how and why Erin and Alison’s stories converge. I loved how we alternated between past and present and the slow burn of the story. It was part mystery, part thriller, and part social commentary with just a touch of the paranormal thrown in. Cooke expertly weaves elements of witchcraft and ancient curses into the narrative using historical facts, which makes it all the more intriguing and believable.

The characters in this book really pop off the page. Clem is a strong yet vulnerable protagonist, whose determination to save her daughter drives the narrative forward. Even though we don’t hear much from Erin, the author does a great job of showing us who she is from the beginning, giving us glimpses of moments in her life from her perspective. I think my favorite character of all was Alison – the woman wrongfully accused of witchcraft simply because she followed unconventional ways. All of her chapters are told in the first person, which helped put me in her head and made me feel closer to her. What she endures is maddening!

I both read and listened to this one, and the narrator’s accent added to the text’s authenticity. My only (very small) complaint about the audio version was I felt like it could have been edited better. There were some weird pauses between sentences and paragraphs, and I could often hear the narrator taking big breaths or swallowing, which kind of took me out of the story but didn’t completely ruin it for me.

Overall, I would definitely recommend this one to anyone looking for an intriguing story that is a mix of historical fiction, psychological thriller, and a bit of the paranormal. It’s well-written, atmospheric, and filled with strong characters and an intriguing plot.

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