Witch Trial
By Harriet Tyce
Harper Perennial/HarperCollins Publishers; paperback, 400 pages; $19.99; available today, Tuesday, September 29th
Harriet Tyce grew up in Edingburgh, Scotland, studied English at Oxford University, and spent nearly a decade working as a criminal barrister, essentially a defense attorney, before making the transition to becoming a fiction writer. Her previous novels have all been Sunday Times bestsellers in the United Kingdon, as her books have sold over a million copies around the world and been translated into over 25 languages. This year, she appeared as a contestant on The Traitors UK, letting her become a household name to a new audience.
Witch Trial is Tyce's latest book, a bestseller in the UK, and now available in the United States. This thriller opens with a murder, as eighteen-year-old Christian Shaw is found dead in a park in Edinburgh. Two of her friends, Eliza Lawson and Isobel Smyth, are charged with the killing.
Social media erupts with endless theories as the city is clamoring for answers. There are whispers about dark rituals, a teenage pact gone wrong, and something even more wicked start to surface.
When the trial commences, a reluctant juror named Matthew Philips, who is a respected heart surgeon, finds himself drawn into the case. However, his certainties unravel as the Defense presents an argument as unsettling as it is unexpected.
Matthew then begins to see things, some that cannot be real, or can they?
Tyce weaves legal drama, occult menace, and psychological suspense into this thriller, in which she found inspiration from Edinburgh's devastating with trials, which she writes about below.
WITCH TRIAL - THE INSPIRATION BEHIND THE BOOK - By Harriet Tyce (provided by HarperCollins):
It feels like a lifetime ago now, but when I was in my twenties and early thirties, I was a criminal barrister - the equivalent of a Defense Attorney. While I only did the job for ten years before starting a family, I learned a lot from it, which has been the primary source of inspiration for the psychological thrillers that I write, all of which deal with themes of criminal justice. The life of a barrister, what it's like to defend a trial, how it feels to leave prison still carrying the weight of guilt for what you've done: these have been subjects I've tackled in the past.
I knew that as I approached by fifth novel, I wanted to explore a courtroom drama from a different angle this time. Not from the perspective of an expert, but from the perspective of a jury member, someone who had no inside knowledge as to what was going on. The deliberations of a jury could be seen as the ultimate locked room mystery - I've never been on a jury, so I wanted to imagine my way in instead.
That was the first point of inspiration behind Witch Trial. The next came from my then editor, who told be brightly that he'd had a brilliant idea. This made me slightly nervous, I must confess, as the last brilliant idea he had led to my scrapping six months of work, but I heard him out. He was right - it was an excellent idea, at least in part. He thought I should look at teenage serial killers. While the aspect of serial killers didn't appeal to me, what did stick was the idea of a teenage defendant. I liked it so much as a suggestion, in fact, that I introduced two teenage defendants into the mix.
So far, so good. A courtroom drama told by a juror about kids in the dock. I worked on this for a while, playing with ideas of how their parents might be behaving, what might be behind their alleged criminal behavior. But something was missing - it felt flat, two-dimensional.
That was when the final part of the puzzle came to light.
The Crucible by Arthur Miler is a classic text and for good reasons. We went to see an excellent production in London's West End a couple of years ago. The idea of bringing aspects of the supernatural into a courtroom gripped me immediately, and I went away and started to read about Salem. The more I read, the more it came to life, and the question started to emerge in my mind: what if the girls from The Craft were tried for murder? This, Witch Trial was born.
I had a lot of work to do. I needed to research the occult - Tarot cards and hexes play a big part in the narrative. I needed to research the psychology of juries, the way that their decisions are reached, the kind of prejudices that every person brings to the table based on their individual backgrounds and lived experience. Imagine my delight when I found a story that combined both aspects, about a jury in 1994 who were deliberating on an unpleasant murder trial where the last words of the murder victim had been recorded as she called the police for help in vain.
Sequestered in a hotel overnight, a few of them decided after having a few drinks that it would be a good idea to ask the Ouija board whether the defendant was guilty. The man was duly convicted. There was another member of the jury who had not participated in the seance, however, and moved heaven and earth to have the case reopened. It's illegal in the UK for jury deliberations to be discussed even after a verdict, and for a while no-one would listen - it was only after a newspaper became involved that the conviction was overturned and a retrial ordered. The fact that the defendant was again convicted is neither here nor there - juries are not permitted to seek any outside information, even from the spirit world.
The book is set in Edinburgh, Scotland, my town of birth and a place that's rich in history generally, and specifically regarding witch trials. In Scotland form the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, between three to four thousand people were tortured, convicted and executed as witches. Hundreds of people were strangled and burned at the stake on the esplanade of the Edinburgh Castle - more than anywhere else in Scotland. The streets are haunted by the ghosts of that past, and the location is as much a character as any of the other players in Witch Trial.
Although I relished the opportunity to write what is in many ways a love letter to my city, it three up one complication, which was that Scots law is markedly different from English law. I toyed with the idea of keeping it set in London, where I was familiar with the system, but the call of Edinburgh was too strong. I had to spend a couple of months giving myself a crash course in Scots criminal procedure, ably assisted by my father, a retired Scottish judge. Any mistakes are entirely mine.
I have never put more research into a book - it took me the best part of ten months to be ready to write. If you're interested, there'a full bibliography at the back of everything I found useful. And I have never loved writing a book more. It felt as if it had a life of its own on the page and I feel that it's had a life of its own in leading me, somehow, to take part in The Traitors UK TV series, and introducing me to a whole new audience of readers - for which I am enormously grateful. The weird foreshadowing in the book of my part in the show is something for another essay; suffice to say, I appear to be fond of putting the cat among the pigeons.
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