The big new novel by the bestselling author of WHISPERS IN THE SAND Emma imagined she was happy — with her successful career in the City and her imminent engagement to her boyfriend, Piers, her future seemed mapped out. So why does the advertisement of Liza’s Cottage for sale — a house she remembers from childhood country holidays — turn her well-ordered life upside down with longing? Mike Sinclair is the new rector of Manningtree and Mistley, a stranger in the tightly knit community on the rural Essex coast. Already he is fascinated by the history of the parish, but especially by the seventeenth century, when Chief Witchfinder Matthew Hopkins conducted his terrible work. It is the ghost of Hopkins that haunts the old shop in the high street, they say — or the spirits of some of his victims who were tortured in the room upstairs. But now a television crew are filming there and, Mike wonders, if they are responsible for the increasing level of supernatural disturbance and the developing sense of unease in the parish? But as he starts to investigate, he realizes with horror that something or someone unpleasant is drawing him irresistibly into its possession. When Emma gives up he