Book Review: The Witchfinder’s Sister by Beth Underdown

It is 1645, the English Civil War is raging, and Alice, recently widowed, returns from London to her Essex home to take up residence in her brother’s inn.

But her brother, Matthew Hopkins, will soon come to be known as the Witchfinder General, and Alice looks on with increasing horror as he tracks down the women they knew as children and imprisons them for witchcraft.

Yet he is driven by an inexplicable hatred that seems to derive from more than doing God’s bidding, and if only she can discover what it is that moves him, perhaps she can stop the carnage.

It is a book for our times: the paranoia of the stranger, the fear of the other, and it is easy to map onto present day politics.

Yet whilst the subject is compelling, the execution feels laboured, the plot frequently sluggish, and it never quite manages to be as satisfying as it could be.