A young Puritan womanfaithful, resourceful, but afraid of the demons that dog her soulplots her escape from a violent marriage in this riveting and propulsive novel of historical suspense.

Boston, 1662. Mary Deerfield is twenty-four-years-old. Her skin is porcelain, her eyes delft blue, and in England she might have had many suitors. But here in the New World, amid this community of saints, Mary is the second wife of Thomas Deerfield, a man as cruel as he is powerful.

But in a world where every neighbor is watching for signs of the devil, a woman like Marya woman who harbors secret desires and finds it difficult to tolerate the brazen hypocrisy of so many men in the colonysoon becomes herself the object of suspicion and rumor. When tainted objects are discovered buried in Mary’s garden, when a boy she has treated with herbs and simples dies, and when their servant girl runs screaming in fright from her home, Mary must fight to not only escape her marriage, but also the gallows.