The Torching: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Evil transcends time - feel that heat!
Review: In this tale of history, horror and mysticism, events from more than 250 years ago take on a terrifying reality in the life of a 1990's woman.

Alice Grey inherited Wetherell's Rare and Used Books from her grandmother, who had taken Alice in after her parents were tragically killed. The shop was her community - she lived above it, provided a home to a nationally admired writers' group which attracted and nurtured both published and wannabe writers from all over the Washington area, and the people from the group and those who worked there were her friends.

Alice's latest book was the story of Evangaline Smith, an 18th century apothecary and midwife in a nearby settlement, who was sentenced to burn as a witch. As the investigation into Evangaline's life deepens, she becomes aware of startling parallels in their lives. It soon becomes apparent that the only way she can save herself and her reputation is to find out what really happened to Evangaline.

This well written book is skillfully and compellingly plotted, bringing the harsh, puritanical town of Maidstone in the 1730's as vividly to life as modern Georgetown. It seems greed, jealousy, and the lengths to which people will go to avoid being found out haven't changed at all.

If you like your thrillers with a bit of a spooky and mystical edge, this is for you.

I can't imagine why Marcy Heidish's entire fiction list is "out of print" - I borrowed this from my local library, and now I'm eager to read more of her work.

Rating:
Summary: interesting read but leaves some questions
Review: Marcy Heidish's book "The Torching" was an intricate web of the historical and the immiediate. She weaves a tale of a young woman, Alice Grey, who is obsessed with "rewriting" the history of an accused sorceress from the eighteenth century. There is an interesting twist as the events from the past come to parallel that which is occuring in the present. Heidish's see-saw between dream and reality makes this book a very tantalizing journey. However, many questions remain unanswered by the end of the novel. I felt it to be somewhat anti-climatic and I still wasn't entirely sure of the connections Heidish was trying to make. Despite this, it was still a fun read. Light but with enough thrills and suspense to give it depth. A pretty good book all around.

Rating:
Summary: Unique story of parallel mysteries, characters, events
Review: Marcy Heidish's book "The Torching" was an intricate web of the historical and the immiediate. She weaves a tale of a young woman, Alice Grey, who is obsessed with "rewriting" the history of an accused sorceress from the eighteenth century. There is an interesting twist as the events from the past come to parallel that which is occuring in the present. Heidish's see-saw between dream and reality makes this book a very tantalizing journey. However, many questions remain unanswered by the end of the novel. I felt it to be somewhat anti-climatic and I still wasn't entirely sure of the connections Heidish was trying to make. Despite this, it was still a fun read. Light but with enough thrills and suspense to give it depth. A pretty good book all around.

Rating:
Summary: Unique story of parallel mysteries, characters, events
Review: This book is actually two stories--one takes place in the early 1990s Washington, D.C. and the other in 1738 Maidstone, MD. Marcy Heidish skilfully intertwines the two stories into one story with two parallel mysteries, characters, events, and with a touch of the supernatural thrown in for good measure. Other authors have tried this, and it often results in a choppy story, as the reader is pulled back and forth between the stories. Heidish is a success because I never had to go back to an earlier part of the novel to remind myself what had happened to the 20th century characters. The book begins ordinarily enough, with Alice Grey, owner of a bookstore in 1990s Washington, D.C. completing her novel about an 18th century midwife, Evangeline Smith, who is charged with witchcraft in Maidstone, MD in 1738. Alice is nearly done with her book when she feels compelled to do more research on her topic. (She literally receives a supernatural wake-up call from the past.) As she delves into the sources she should have read the first time, she begins to change her mind about Evangeline as she learns of multiple interpretations to events and to previously respected people. When she decides to find out the truth about Evangeline, that is when her life eerily begins to resemble Evangeline's final months, when she realizes that the people she thought were friends prove to be otherwise, and events in her life begin to parallel events in Evangeline's life 253 years earlier. There are some interesting and unexpected parallels done with the characters and their relationships, both romantic and platonic, in both settings. Heidish does a nice job in this book illustrating how people and events that may appear straightforward on the surface may actually be quite different once people decide to look below the surface.
This book is a good, fast read (I finished over a single weekend). I thought that the characters, both the heroines (& heros) and the villains were well developed, and I liked the storylines (both the 18th & 20th centuries).
What prevents me from rating this book 5 stars is the sense I have that the author (Heidish) had rushed to finish it and/or she had a page limit which she was close to exceeding when the novel ended. I found the ending to be rushed, and the destruction of the main character's (Alice Grey's) relationship with her best friend (who attempted a horrible crime against Alice) was brushed aside as if it were a matter of small consequence. The loss of any close friendship usually means some kind of introspection, and that was not demonstrated here. Readers are not given what Alice thought of this turn of events, nor how she dealt with it. I think that would have made a more satisfactory ending. Nonetheless, the positives outweigh the negatives, and if you like your mysteries with a twist, interesting characters, supernatural happenings to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up (but not so scary as to keep you up at night), and a well thought-out parallel story within the story, then this book is for you.