During Connie's investigation, she relies on a handsome steeplejack for romance and her mother and an expert on American colonial history for clues and support. What follows is a breezy read in which Connie must uncover the mystery of a shadowy book written by the enigmatic Deliverance Dane. After moving into her grandmother's crumbling house to get it in shape for sale, Connie comes across a small key and piece of paper reading only 'Deliverance Dane.' The Salem witch trials, contemporary Wicca and women's roles in early American history figure prominently as Connie does her academic detective work. Set in Cambridge and Marblehead, Mass., Howe's propulsive if derivative novel alternates between the 1991 story of college student Connie Goodwin and a group of 17th-century outcasts. Written with astonishing conviction and grace, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane travels seamlessly between the witch trials of the 1690s and a modern woman's story of mystery, intrigue, and revelation. This discovery launches Connie on a quest-to find out who this woman was and to unearth a rare artifact of singular power: a physick book, its pages a secret repository for lost knowledge.Īs the pieces of Deliverance's harrowing story begin to fall into place, Connie is haunted by visions of the long-ago witch trials, and she begins to fear that she is more tied to Salem's dark past then she could have ever imagined. The key contains a yellowing fragment of parchment with a name written upon it: Deliverance Dane. As she is drawn deeper into the mysteries of the family house, Connie discovers an ancient key within a seventeenth-century Bible. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie's grandmother's abandoned home near Salem, she can't refuse.

Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin needs to spend her summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation. A spellbinding, beautifully written novel that moves between contemporary times and one of the most fascinating and disturbing periods in American history - the Salem witch trials.

The physick book of deliverance dane