Witch Cradle

By Kathleen Hills

January, 1951, while the country is in the grip of war in Korea, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and Senator Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare, the residents of St. Adele, Michigan, are more concerned with staying warm and shoveling snow until a bizarre ice storm brings down a towering pine. Entangled in its roots is evidence that leads Constable John McIntire to the abandoned farmstead of a young couple who had supposedly left the community years before, part of an exodus of Finnish-Americans gone off to build a workers’ Utopia in the Soviet republic of Karelia. McIntire’s fears are realized when he discovers two bodies, buried sixteen years in an unused cistern.
In his zeal to uncover the truth, McIntire brings the scrutiny—and the suspicion—of a Red-hunting government agent upon his neighbors and himself. It is only the beginning of his mis-calculations. Each step in investigating the deaths seems only to bring more misery to the living. Old wounds are opened, old terrors rekindled, and old wrongs exposed. McIntire himself is not immune. He struggles to solve the two-decades-old murders, while a part of the past he hoped to bury forever threatens to destroy his new life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
• Release date: May 27, 2010
• ISBN: 9781615950997

Kathleen Hills

Kathleen Hills spent the first forty years of her life in rural Minnesota before leaving for the real world and a career in speech and language pathology. After determining that ten years in the real world should be all that is demanded of anyone, she turned to writing. She is the author of Past Imperfect, Hunter’s Dance, and Witch Cradle, mysteries set in 1950s Michigan featuring John McIntire, township constable. Kathleen divides her time between northern Minnesota and Aberdeenshire, Scotland.