The Death Pit

Plot

"The San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle called The Poison Tree, Tony Strong's first novel, "a perversely compelling upscale erotic thriller, a victory for the guilty pleasure." Now Strong returns with this exquisite, finely wrought novel of suspense that interweaves a historical mystery with a ghastly contemporary crime. Scholar Terry Williams plans to go to Babcock Castle in Inverness, Scotland, with one goal in mind: to finish her research on Catherine McCulloch, a 17th-century woman accused of "congress with the devil" and burned at the stake as a witch during Scotland's notorious witch trials, which darkly mirrored those in Salem, Massachusetts, in their ferocity and scope. When Terry arrives, however, she discovers a town obsessed with a more recent death. The dismembered body of a beautiful young woman, Donna Fairhead, has been found on a farm near Babcock. When she hears rumors that Donna was a part of Nineveh, a Wiccan coven, only Terry is able to see the grim connection to Catherine's death almost three hundred years earlier. As Terry continues her work, she discovers both a town filled with secrets and lies and a truth left buried in Catherine's yellowed letters and the mysterious Book of Shadows. It soon becomes clear that only Terry understands the dimensions of the crimes that have occurred and--unless the puzzle is unraveled in time--are about to happen again.