Devil and Miss Smy

The murderous fingers of Suffolk''s witchfinders stretch still across the centuries.

How can the evil accusation of a woman as a witch in 1647 unleash a series of events culminating in the unlawful death of an Ipswich magician''s assistant in 1913? When two of the most notorious 17th-century witchfinders, Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, visit the remote Suffolk village of Kenton, their actions create a legacy that sees a man wrongly imprisoned for murder over 200 years later.

In the second of his Winifred Smy mysteries, Michael Heath reintroduces the eponymous amateur sleuth who finds herself gradually entangled in murders old and new. Drawing on

acquaintances first met in the previous novella, ''Killing Time in Kenton'', a fast-moving narrative unfolds that ricochets between two parallel centuries until Miss Smy finally unmasks the real killer.