Mina, a child psychologist who is engaged but not really into her fiance, goes to her grief group to cope with the loss of her beloved brother Eddie. There she meets Sam Hunter, a journalist who is grieving his daughter. Sam asks her to investigate a case he’s pursuing about Alice, a 13 year old girl from a small town who claims she is possessed by a witch. Mina and Sam go to the town to figure out what’s really going on. 

I loved the writing in this novel. I felt like I understood the main character of Mina and especially enjoyed following her as she got more of a sense of Alice and the small community around Alice. The author isn’t unearthing new territory here, as the beats of the novel felt very familiar to me as a fan of both horror movies and horror novels. The novel does stay out of horror territory for the first 75% of the book, which I liked. A bit of a downside is that I thought the writing pointed to the antagonist before even the halfway point with little to no red herrings, so the novel wasn’t as suspenseful as I wanted it to be. I wondered why the novel was set in the late 1980s (no cell phones?, a time when hauntings were popular?) because the novel felt more contemporary, so when little things were mentioned about the late 1980s, it threw me. 

The audiobook narrator Ana Clements had a nice but not distracting British lilt. She did voices well so that the reader knew what was dialogue and what wasn’t. Emotion was present in her voice but not overdone. I’d definitely recommend this novel on audio.  

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. It publishes February 11, 2025.