Vera Jane Cook

Annabel Horton is hanged on Gallows Hill in Salem, Massachusetts, during the infamous witch trials, but she does not die, at least not in the way we understand dying. Lost to time, stealing the flesh of those that the devil favors, she struggles to protect her family from the insidious evil that follows her.

In the town of Hollow Creek, South Carolina two separate murders, fifteen years apart, unite fifteen-year-old Pleasant Day and sixty-year-old Clarissa Blackwell. As Pleasant struggles with her mother's distance, her father's infidelity and the death of her best friend, she draws closer to Clarissa, an older woman with an uncanny, almost psychic, ability to 'read people.' As Clarissa uncovers the stories behind the murders, both Pleasant and Clarissa's worlds are transformed by the truths they’re forced to accept, and both find solace and strength in the shared histories that have shaped them.