I confess that I am a witch. I have sold myself body and soul unto Satan. My mother took me to the Blinkbonny Woods where we met other witches. I put a hand on the crown of my head and the other on the sole of my foot. I gave everything between unto him.

Scotland, late seventeeth century. A young woman is accused of witchcraft. Tortured with pins and sleep deprivation, she is using all of her the Scottish witch-hunt began.

Probably more than a thousand men and women were exectued for witchcraft before the frenzy died down. When Edinburgh-based Advocate John MacKenzie and his assistant Davie Scougall investigate the suspicious death of a woman denounced as a witch, they find themselves in a village overwhelmed by superstition, resentment and puritanical religion. In a time of spiritual, political and social upheaval, will reason allow MacKenzie to reveal the true evil lurking in the town, before the witch-hunt claims yet another victim?/

Douglas Watt is a historian, poet and novelist. He is the author of The Price of Scotland: Darien, Union and the Wealth of Nations, a well-received history of the Darien Disaster and Parliamentary Union between Scotland and England, which won the Hume Brown Senior Prize in Scottish History in 2008. He is also the author of Death of a Chief, the first novel in the series of pre-Enlightenment crime novels, featuring John MacKenzie, Investigative Advocate. Douglas Watt has also contributed opinion pieces to the Scotsman on financial, historical and political subjects. He lives in Linlithgow with his wife Julie and their three children.