The Death Pit - Hardcover

Strong, Tony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385408730 ISBN 13: 9780385408738

Publisher: Bantam Press, 1999

Synopsis

The bodies of a young woman and two newborn babies are found in the "death pit" of a farm in the Scottish Highlands, stirring up hidden fears of a satanic circle.

About this title

Review

As he did so well in his first thriller, The Poison Tree, Tony Strong again takes us into a closed-off world and exposes its most private secrets in his second novel, The Death Pit. Even though the Scottish town of Inverness seems a long way from the rarefied literary circles of Oxford (where the first story took place), both are small town environments that engender gossip and illicit goings-on.

A flourishing modern coven of witches seems a natural part of the Scottish landscape--especially since nearby Babcock Castle was the scene of a notorious 17th-century trial and the burning of Catherine McCulloch, a woman accused of witchcraft. But when the body of one of the women in the coven is found dismembered in a foul pit where diseased pigs are discarded, some of the residents blame the witches and take violent action against them.

Terry Williams, a PhD candidate, has come to Babcock Castle to study McCullogh's papers, and finds herself caught up in the mystery when she discovers a link between the past and the present. Strong is a sly writer who knows how to create sympathetic, believable characters and place them in a tightly controlled atmosphere where sex and danger charge the air. --Dick Adler

From the Back Cover

When young academic Terry Williams goes to a remote corner of the Scottish Highlands, she's simply intending to edit the letters of Catherine McCulloch, tortured and burnt as a witch in the seventeenth century. But then the body of a young woman is found on a local farm, dumped in the death pit amidst a pile of rotting pigs. She is Donna Fairhead, one of a nearby community of Wiccans - modern-day witches.

As the forensic excavation of the death pit throws up yet more horrors, Terry's work on the letters reveals that there may have been more to Catherine's death than anyone had ever imagined. And as the present-day death toll mounts, Terry realizes that the identity of the killer may also be part of a three-centuries-old mystery, a mystery whose next victim might well be herself...

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385408730
• ISBN 13: 9780385408738
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352