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?
"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... 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." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A good pick for readers interested in witch trials throughout history, as Cooke melds elements of horror, historical fiction, family drama, and a police procedural into this witchy novel." - Library Journal
"The Book of Witching is brilliant and mesmerizing from start to finish and contains a final act that will have readers simply riveted. C.J. Cooke knows how to scare you, and her combination of the historical and the imagined storylines about actual witching in our world is the stuff of legend." - Book Reporter