Mercy — Wendy Saunders

Mercy is a sleepy town in Massachusetts. According to the locals it was founded as a safe haven by the survivors of the Salem witch trials. Olivia West hadn't set foot in Mercy since the night her Father murdered her mother and had no intention of ever returning despite being a direct descendant of one of the original founders, but when she unexpectedly inherits a house by the lake she finds she has no choice. The closer she gets to the town the more she can feel a strange pull, calling to her blood...someone or something wants her to come home. When the bodies of missing residents are discovered in the woods near her house, it becomes clear there's a killer on the loose who seems to have taken an unhealthy interest in Olivia. What is even more disturbing is that each victim is marked with some kind of supernatural brand. To make matters worse it appears that the murders are almost identical to a spate of killings twenty years earlier which mysteriously stopped after her father's arrest. Theodore Beckett is a young witch finder from seventeenth century Salem who has been hiding a huge secret from his strict Puritan family. He has dreams, strange visions which have an alarming tendency to come true. But when he finds himself pulled abruptly through time by a mysterious stranger to be dropped in the middle of twenty first century Mercy, Theo realises the woman he has been sent there to help is the woman he has seen in his dreams all his life. Olivia and Theo must find a way to trust each other when they are suddenly thrown together into a world of murder and magic. It becomes clear there is something dark stirring in the woods and the murders are only just the beginning. It is all connected like a giant web spun from centuries of lies, murders and magic and it all keeps coming back to her family at the heart of it. Olivia can no longer ignore her past but must discover her family's true legacy starting with what really happened the night her mother died. Together Olivia and Theo must stop a murderer and uncover her family's oldest and darkest secret, to prevent a demon from rising...and time is running out.