The Torching, by Marcy Heidish

Retrieved from: someone else's library
(0671743759), 1992
Suggested by: not sure; it's on my good books list
My Ratings: 8 Merit, 7 Interest, 7 Fun

This is billed as a horror novel, but it's really more of a supernatural/historical book. Think Shirley Jackson meets Sharyn McCrumb in Washington, D.C.

The plot revolves around a novelist who uses famous crimes from American history and really crawls inside the protagonist's heads as she writes her novels. Her current project is about a lesser-known case from the 17th-century that is similar in tone to some of the Salem witch trial cases.

Oddly, Evangeline Smith's life begins to intersect and parallel hers in an eerie and eventually frightening way: a body is found her bookshop--just as a body is found in Evangeline's house--hidden, with its eyes gouged out. She is accused of an unprovable crime--just as Evangeline was--with "proof" provided by the dead man. And she discovers that those whom she thought she could trust are probably the ones trying to bring her down.

An odd, literary-but-trashy, fun read.