Emma Dickson has a good job in London, a luxury flat and a man she loves to share it all with, but a chance glimpse at a cottage for sale on the Essex coast turns her life upside down. Liza's Cottage is a house she has often seen while on idyllic family holidays and suddenly, she has to have it. She turns her back on city life, her lover and everything she knows to live in the country, starting instead to think about running her new home with its large garden as an herb farm. But Liza's Cottage is haunted by the ghost of a long-dead witch, one of those whom Matthew Hopkins, the notorious Witchfinder General, persecuted and tortured back in the 1640's. Hopkins' ghost is around, too looking for somebody to possess as is the spirit of Sarah, Liza's young friend. For this is an area that has had a history of witchcraft stretching back into the mists of time and having a film crew making a television series about haunted houses around isn't going to help at all, and neither is the local witch and the handsome new vicar.

If you like the supernatural stories of Phil Rickman, with their mixing of the cozy country crime style of The Midsomer Murders with The Exorcist, then this ought to have appeal. There are many things to like: the new take on the well-known old story of Matthew Hopkins, some wonderful descriptions of rural Essex, delightfully wry comments about city versus country life, the modern church and New Age culture and a delightful final page that sends up the varying styles of several national newspapers. It isn't easy to bring something lively and exciting to the hackneyed formula of haunted houses, but Barbara Erskine has managed to do just that. Here is a book that deserves to be a bestseller. A real Winter's Tale of a book and just the thing to curl up with on a long, dark night.

Barbara Erskine's fat supernatural novels tend to head for the bestseller lists. This is the tenth of her gripping books, and the best to date. Great stuff!