New Historical Fiction: Witch Hunts, Wartime and Mysterious Murders

The island of Berggrund is only an hour’s sail from the mainland, but in 1825 its superstitious inhabitants are as detached from the larger currents of Swedish life as they were 150 years earlier, when the community’s priest ordered most of its women put to death for witchcraft. Anna Noyes’s haunting first novel, THE BLUE MAIDEN (Grove, 240 pp., $26), explores the sinister effects of this legacy on the two daughters of Silas, the island’s current pastor, a descendant of one of the few women to be spared.

Ulrika has only faint memories of her mother, who died giving birth to Bea. And both girls feel the chill of Silas’s strangely resentful grief: “Bea’s father has never told her he loves her, and she does not know how to make him smile.” Left to their own devices, they explore Berggrund’s fields and coves, learning nature’s lore from a neighbor and from a red leather book that’s been passed down through generations of local women. As they grow older, these activities inflame their father’s paranoia. Convinced that the Devil has returned, he wonders if “all along I’ve had two snakes, curled in the beds in my very house.”

The Blue Maiden of the novel’s title is a nearby island — “a parallel realm, a hidden world” — uninhabited except by the myths surrounding the long-gone witches’ sacrifices in “Satan’s midnight meadow.” Because she was a mainlander, the girls’ mother is linked to that past, but it isn’t until Bea marries and becomes a mother that her family’s secrets will be fully revealed. By then, of course, the damage has already been done.

The damage at the heart of Graham Moore’s historical thriller THE WEALTH OF SHADOWS (Random House, 384 pp., $30) is global in scale. It’s 1939, with the United States still on the sidelines of World War II, and Ansel Luxford, a Minneapolis tax attorney, has been recruited to join the research division at the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. Unofficially, he’s to be part of a deeply clandestine effort “to knock the legs out from underneath the German economy without giving the appearance that we’re picking sides.” If he and his colleagues succeed, the Nazi military will be crippled.