The Devil's Ledger is finished and in production. It is not on sale yet.
It takes the North Berwick witch trials — the panic that followed the storm which nearly drowned James VI and his bride on the crossing home in 1590, and which put a king personally into an interrogation room and eventually into print on the subject of witchcraft.
The premise is a single inversion of the usual one. Not one of the burned is a witch.
Elspeth Craw is an aging healer who can feel genuine craft living in another soul, and who is pressed into service as a searcher of the accused — the person who examines bodies for the devil's mark. She is therefore in the best position in Scotland to know that everyone being killed is innocent, and that the slaughter itself is doing something: that it is a working, steered by a real hand, paying a debt in the only currency that debt accepts.
The difficulty is that the truth is unspeakable in the most literal sense. To name what is actually happening is to say the word the entire court is already screaming, and to be burned for saying it.
Paperback, 6 × 9, 202 pages. If you would like to know the day it goes on sale, write to the press and we will tell you.
In the meantime, the other standalones set in the same world are here.