Hour of the Witch

Hour of the Witch (2021) is Chris Bohjalian's historical thriller set in Boston in 1662. Mary Deerfield, 24, has spent five years married to Thomas Deerfield, a mill owner two decades her senior and a violent drunk. After he drives a three-tined fork into her hand in a drunken rage, Mary resolves to do something almost no woman in the colony has done: seek a divorce.

Her petition draws exactly the kind of scrutiny a Puritan woman cannot survive. Neighbors already watch for signs of the devil, and Mary's desire for freedom looks like defiance. When mysterious objects are found buried in her garden, a boy she treated with herbal remedies dies, and the family's servant girl flees the house screaming, suspicion turns from her marriage to her soul — and Mary must fight not only to escape Thomas but to keep herself off the gallows.

Bohjalian builds the novel in two halves, "The Book of the Wife" and "The Book of the Witch," tracing how religious hysteria and patriarchal control worked together in colonial New England to punish a woman who would not stay silent. A New York Times bestseller on publication, it combines courtroom drama with psychological suspense against the backdrop of the era that produced the Salem witch trials.