This is the second book in William Hussey’s Witchfinder trilogy and in now characteristic style it opens with a horrifying tale of child sacrifice, plus one of those memorable images that Hussey conjures so easily. In the first novel it was the exploding poisonous toads. This time it is the sacrificed children’s fingers and toes that have been ‘laid out like a row of little sausages’!
Once again Jake Harker is the only thing that stands between the Demon Father and the annihilation of mankind and at the beginning of the book he is in no fit state to fulfil that task. The magic that he found at the end of the first book seems to have left him and although he now has an odd assortment of monsters, friends and his dad on his side, they are no match for the Demon Father and his father appears to be dying. To make matters worse, the girl he’s started to fall in love with, Rachel, appears to be sweet on his best friend, Simon.
So in a teenage pique fuelled quest to re-find his magic, cure his dying father and put a stop to the Demon Father’s plans, he plunges back through time to the seventeenth century, which is where matters start to get seriously dangerous for him.
As with the first book, this is another page turner, packed full of action, horror and a cast of some of the creepiest characters you will find in fiction. There is also a light touch at play: the Badderson father and son combo, for example, are quite adorable, for all that they are trolls, and I became rather fond of the many-armed Pandora. The domestic scenes with the Hobarron family in the seventeeth century are handled with great delicacy too. Will this make the book more acceptable to girls? Probably not unless they like stomach-churning gore as well. But it does make for a more rounded book and a lot more to think about.
And one final warning: the cover. This is definitely not a book to be left face up on the bedside table!
The last book in the series, The Last Nightfall, is due out in September.
The lovely people at Oxford sent me this review copy. If you want one for yourself please order it via the link below and Amazon will make a small contribution to maintaining this blog.
