The Witch Book Review, Synopsis & Ending Explained: 7 Twists

5 days ago

Book Axis

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Picture this: every single night at 3:41 a.m. on the dot, a massive antique grandfather clock and a groundskeeper’s wristwatch both freeze cold inside a rotting 1692 Massachusetts estate. Outside a locked bedroom door, a disembodied woman weeps in the dark, while out on the back lawn, an eighty-five-year-old grandmother with dementia casually digs up a human pelvic bone like she is gardening.

In The Witch, Freida McFadden ditches her standard suburban cul-de-sac formula for a dual-timeline gothic thriller that braids colonial witch-hunt hysteria with a modern domestic con job. It culminates in a double identity-theft reveal spanning three centuries and a climax where an octogenarian goes full vigilante with a garden shovel.

Core Assessment Metric	Analytical Verdict & Breakdown	Score
1692 Historical Timeline	Surprisingly gritty, claustrophobic, and carries the emotional weight of the entire novel.	8.5 / 10
Present-Day Mystery	Undermined by a remarkably passive protagonist and a Scooby-Doo villain fake-out.	5.0 / 10
Prose & Historical Voice	Clunky transitions between modern American idioms and forced 17th-century “verily” dialogue.	4.5 / 10
Plot Twists & Architecture	Clever double-mirroring of stolen identities, even if the modern timeline requires massive suspension of disbelief.	7.5 / 10
Overall Critical Rating	60% Critique / 40% Praise — Addictive popcorn fiction that stumbles hard under logical scrutiny.	6.4 / 10

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The Critic’s Verdict: Why It’s 60% Flawed & 40% Addictive

As someone who has ploughed through hundreds of psychological thrillers, let us be dead honest about what McFadden is doing here. She is the undisputed queen of fast-food fiction, and while The Witch is a massive step up from her lazier recent releases, it still suffers from glaring structural shortcuts.

The Good (40% Praise):
- The 1692 Braid: The colonial Woodhaven chapters featuring Caroline Eldridge actually have teeth, showing how ordinary town gossip weaponises fear into state-sanctioned murder.
- The Portrait Payoff: Hiding the ultimate historical twist inside an oil painting introduced in the early chapters is a genuinely clever bit of sleight-of-hand.
- Caregiver Tenderness: The quiet scenes depicting Letitia “Gram” Barlow and her unravelling memory—burnt toast served with pride, unravelling knitting—show a rare emotional maturity.
The Bad & The Ugly (60% Critique):
- The Scooby-Doo Haunting Con: Spending three hundred pages building supernatural dread only to reveal that an eighty-year-old woman and a groundskeeper were faking it with alarm pods and muddy boots drains all the atmosphere on reflection.
- A Cardboard Protagonist: Julia Barlow has the survival instincts of a wet paper bag, spending 80% of the book waiting for men to drive her places or explain things to her.
- The 50-Year Identity Plot Hole: Expecting readers to believe that Letty let her sister’s murderer pretend to be her sister under the same roof for five decades without cracking is completely bonkers.
- Anachronistic Prose: Watching a 17th-century Puritan wife drop a random “’tis” right next to modern millennial sentence rhythms is enough to give any serious historical fiction reader whiplash.

Did you see that portrait swap coming, or did McFadden pull the wool over your eyes? Drop your verdict in the comments at the bottom of the page!

The Witch Book Review, Synopsis & Ending Explained: 7 Twists

Detailed Summary

Part I: The Haunting of Pemberton & The Shadow of 1692 (Prologue – Chapter 16)

Prologue (1692) opens in the Puritan settlement of Woodhaven, Massachusetts, where Caroline Eldridge reflects on a grim family curse. Every woman in her bloodline has died young, yet she never anticipated her own life would end at the hands of neighbours accusing her of witchcraft. The atmosphere is immediately thick with paranoia, establishing that once an accusation is spoken in 1692, no legal mechanism exists to prove innocence.

In Chapter 1, the narrative jumps to the present day as 27-year-old Julia Barlow hits rock bottom after losing both her job and her apartment. With zero options left in the tank, she retreats to Pemberton, her family’s sprawling, dilapidated 17th-century estate in rural Massachusetts. Officially, she is playing the dutiful granddaughter checking in on her 85-year-old grandmother, Letitia “Gram” Barlow, and Gram’s 80-year-old sister, Ethel. Unofficially, Julia is broke and looking for a free roof to hide under while her life falls apart.

Chapter 2 details Julia‘s chaotic first five minutes on the property, where she nearly gives the groundskeeper, Mick Wheeler, a heart attack by screaming in the driveway. Moments later, her dementia-stricken grandmother Gram mistakes the 27-year-old Julia for her octogenarian great-aunt Ethel. Ethel and Gram inform Julia that she will be sleeping in the original bedroom of Caroline Eldridge, the first wife of their ancestor Archibald “Archie” Eldridge. According to family lore, Caroline was executed as a witch in 1692, right before Archie married the housemaid, Molly Howe, from whom Julia descends.

Chapter 3 shifts back to 1692, introducing Caroline Eldridge inside a cold, loveless marriage to the wealthy, pious merchant Archibald Eldridge. Desperate to secure her position and appease Archie‘s obsession with an heir, Caroline lies and claims she is finally pregnant. Over dinner, they discuss the “Night Reaper,” a serial strangler who has already murdered three young women across Woodhaven. When Caroline slips outside to feed a stray cat she names Gideon, her sharp-tongued housemaid Molly Howe scolds her, warning that cats are familiars of the devil.

In Chapter 4, present-day Julia explores the decaying hallways of Pemberton and examines the prized family heirloom hanging in the parlour. It is an antique 18th-century oil portrait depicting her supposed ancestors, Archibald and Molly, looking stern and prosperous. Julia‘s father rings to inform her that the local Woodhaven Museum is desperate to purchase Pemberton and preserve it as a historical site, though Ethel stubbornly refuses to sell. That evening, Ethel coldly warns Julia to keep her bedroom door locked after dark, triggering Julia‘s childhood memory of hearing a ghostly woman weeping in the house—an event that left Julia with a permanent white streak in her hair.

Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 escalate the nocturnal weirdness inside Pemberton as Julia tries to survive her first nights in Caroline‘s old bedroom. The lights flicker without warning, and Julia wakes in a cold sweat to the sound of a disembodied female voice crying for help right outside her locked door. The next morning, Mick Wheeler casually winds the parlour grandfather clock, informing Julia that it stops dead at 3:41 a.m. every single night. Even more bizarrely, Mick reveals that a repairman found nothing wrong with the gears, and Mick‘s own wristwatch freezes at the exact same minute.

In Chapter 7 and Chapter 8, Caroline visits the 1692 Woodhaven town market to seek help from her only true friend, an elderly herbalist named Hitty Atkins. Hitty acts as a mother figure to Caroline, handing her a fertility tonic brewed from sage and black cohosh so she can actually conceive before Archie discovers her pregnancy lie. Hitty confesses her terror that the Night Reaper will target her next. Nearby, Caroline purchases meat from the local butcher, Elias Fenn, who nastily warns her to stay clear of Hitty, calling the old healer a witch. Before leaving the square, Caroline locks eyes with a brooding, long-haired outcast named Jonas Reeve.

Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 follow Julia into town, where she visits the Woodhaven Museum and meets its suspenders-wearing curator, Henry Ziegler. Henry is obsessed with Pemberton’s 17th-century architecture—especially its antique brass door knocker—and invites Julia to dinner to pitch his museum acquisition plan. When Julia brings up family lore, Henry drops a bombshell that shatters her version of history: Caroline Eldridge was never burned at the stake as the family claimed, because Puritans executed witches by hanging. Back at Pemberton, Gram insists the moaning outside Julia‘s door belongs to Caroline‘s restless spirit.

In Chapter 11 and Chapter 12, the 1692 timeline turns grim when Caroline‘s neighbour, Hiram Hatch, begs her to help his critically ill wife, Judith Hatch. The pompous town physician, Dr. Shaylor, demands Hiram‘s horse as payment and insists on performing a brutal bloodletting on Judith despite Caroline‘s protests. When Judith suffers a violent seizure during the procedure, Dr. Shaylor washes his hands of the failure by declaring Judith possessed by the devil. Once the doctor flees, Caroline uses Hitty‘s herbal knowledge and cold compresses to break Judith‘s fever, saving her life—an act of competence that the town immediately views as demonic sorcery.

Chapter 13 and Chapter 14 track Caroline walking home through the dark woods after nursing Judith, where a cloaked figure lunges from the trees. It is her husband Archie, who informs her that the town authorities have officially arrested Hitty Atkins for witchcraft. Meanwhile, in the present day, Julia becomes convinced that Caroline‘s ghost is trapped in the house after hearing heavy footsteps and seeing unexplained lights glowing through the cracks of the locked attic door. Determined to play amateur detective, Julia downloads a dodgy ghost-hunting app onto her phone and pesters Gram until the old woman finally surrenders the heavy iron key to the attic.

In Chapter 15 and Chapter 16, Julia creeps into the cobweb-choked attic of Pemberton and rummages through centuries of hoarded Eldridge family trunks. Beneath a preserved antique peacock-blue dress, she discovers two yellowed letters written decades ago by a young Ethel to her mother, Gertrude Eldridge, which were never posted. Julia reads the first unsealed letter, learning that in the late 1960s, Ethel‘s fiancé Howard was killed in Vietnam, leaving Ethel secretly pregnant out of wedlock. The letter also mentions that Ethel and Letty employed a live-in maid named Celia Caine, who was engaged to their young groundskeeper, Mick Wheeler.

Part II: Spectral Evidence, Buried Bones & The Vietnam Letters (Chapters 17 – 34)

Chapter 17 and Chapter 18 ramp up the psychological warfare against Julia the very night after she snoops in the attic. Looking out her bedroom window into the moonlit garden, Julia spots a hangman’s noose dangling from an oak tree branch and a smeared handprint pressed against the glass. Shaken to her core, she meets Henry Ziegler at a local Woodhaven coffee shop, where she is joined by Alastair Dixon, a self-proclaimed paranormal investigator she hired online. Alastair, whose credentials consist of a questionable internet diploma, brings comedic slapstick energy that clashes wildly with Henry‘s stiff academic scepticism.

In Chapter 19 and Chapter 20, Ethel reluctantly allows Alastair Dixon to sweep Pemberton with his K2 electromagnetic field meter and malfunctioning alarm pods. Alastair declares that the estate has off-the-charts electromagnetic readings and warns that their presence is making Caroline‘s spirit violently angry. He installs an Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) digital recorder to capture midnight whispers and pauses in front of the parlour portrait of Archibald and Molly, remarking that something about the painting’s composition feels deeply off.

Chapter 21 and Chapter 22 return to 1692 as Woodhaven descends into bloodthirsty madness with two simultaneous spectacles. First, Sheriff Bixby parades the social outcast Jonas Reeve through Town Square in chains, arresting him for the Night Reaper murders after he was found looming over the corpse of 16-year-old Leonora Rowley. Immediately after, Hitty Atkins is dragged to the gallows following a sham witchcraft trial. As the noose tightens, Hitty locks eyes with Caroline from the platform, and unable to stay silent, Caroline screams in protest that Hitty is an innocent healer—signing her own death warrant in front of the mob.

In Chapter 23 and Chapter 24, the cruel Deputy Oliver Strickland—son-in-law to Sheriff Bixby—arrests Caroline on charges of witchcraft and drags her into the town dungeon. Sheriff Bixby orders a humiliating search for a “devil’s mark,” allowing Deputy Strickland and jailers to strip Caroline naked, withhold her food, and subject her to repeated sexual menace and coercion. Thrown into a pitch-black basement cell adjacent to Jonas Reeve, Caroline learns that Jonas actually loved Leonora Rowley and tried to save her, swearing to Caroline that he promised Hitty before her execution that he would protect Caroline at all costs.

Chapter 25 and Chapter 26 cut back to the present day, where Julia wakes to find Gram wandering the backyard in her nightgown, clutching a dirt-crusted human pelvic bone she dug out of the lawn. Convinced that Caroline‘s ghost compelled Gram to unearth her own remains, Julia smuggles the pelvis into the Woodhaven Museum. Henry Ziegler is horrified that she tampered with potential archaeological evidence, yet he agrees to send the bone to a forensic colleague in Boston for carbon-14 dating and DNA extraction. Henry also suggests Julia submit her own DNA swab to compare against the historical remains.

In Chapter 27 and Chapter 28, Caroline‘s 1692 witchcraft trial commences before Magistrate Putman, exposing the venomous rot of Woodhaven. Caroline is sickened to see her housemaid Molly Howe sitting in the courtroom brazenly wearing Caroline‘s stolen peacock-blue dress. A parade of neighbours—including butcher Elias Fenn and a market acquaintance who claims she felt a phantom needle prick after Caroline waved at her—deliver absurd spectral testimony. Deputy Strickland presents a rigged needle test, and Molly delivers the fatal blow by testifying she witnessed Caroline consorting with the devil. When Magistrate Putman asks Archie to defend his wife, Archie stays ice-cold and silent, sealing Caroline‘s death sentence.

Chapter 29 and Chapter 30 follow Julia as she moves out of Caroline‘s terrifying bedroom and finally breaks the seal on the second 1960s letter written by Ethel. Doing the basic calendar maths on Ethel‘s secret pregnancy and the birth date of Julia‘s father, Julia realises a massive family lie: Gram (Letty) isn’t her biological grandmother—Ethel is. Julia marches out to the gardening shed to confront Mick Wheeler about Ethel‘s past and the mysterious maid Celia Caine. Noticing two small, fresh footprints in the mud outside the shed, Julia grills Mick, who claims he hears Caroline‘s ghost in the shed and flatly lies, denying he ever knew anyone named Celia.

In Chapter 31 and Chapter 32, Julia tries to track down Celia Caine and questions Gram directly. The moment the name “Celia” is spoken, Gram becomes violently agitated, panicking that she is forbidden from speaking about her. Over dinner with Henry, he offers to use museum databases to trace Celia Caine, though tension flares between them over Gram‘s deteriorating living conditions at Pemberton. That night, Alastair Dixon rings Julia urgently about his audio analysis, right before Julia spots a flashlight beam in the shed and finds fresh muddy footprints right outside her bedroom door.

Chapter 33 and Chapter 34 bring the domestic conflict to a boiling point when Alastair Dixon arrives at Pemberton’s front door and plays his enhanced EVP recording. Amidst the static, a raspy voice clearly whispers a single name: “Celia”. Moments later, chaos erupts because Adult Protective Services (APS) has been tipped off regarding elder neglect involving Gram. Furious, Ethel accuses Julia of ratting them out to the state and kicks Julia out of Pemberton on the spot. As Julia packs her bags, Henry calls and confesses that he was the one who alerted APS out of genuine fear for Gram‘s safety.

Part III: The Night Reaper Unmasked & The Shovel Showdown (Chapters 35 – 50)

Chapter 35 and Chapter 36 return to the 1692 dungeon on the eve of Caroline‘s scheduled hanging. Deputy Strickland enters the basement to beat Jonas Reeve and assault Caroline, but Jonas overpowers the sadistic deputy, locks Strickland inside the cell, and sets the wooden jailhouse ablaze. While Deputy Strickland burns alive in the inferno—leaving the townsfolk to assume Jonas and Caroline perished in the flames—the two fugitives escape into the night. Before fleeing Woodhaven forever, Caroline insists on sneaking back into Pemberton one last time to grab Archie‘s hidden coin stash to fund their escape.

In Chapter 37 and Chapter 38, Caroline creeps into the dark parlour of Pemberton in 1692 and walks straight into a nightmare. Her pious husband Archibald Eldridge is standing over the housemaid Molly Howe, strangling the life out of her with his bare hands. Archie is the real Night Reaper. With chilling calm, Archie confesses to Caroline that he strangled his first wife Temperance (who everyone thought died of a fever), murdered Leonora Rowley and the other town girls, and is now killing Molly because she fell pregnant with his bastard child and demanded marriage.

Chapter 39 and Chapter 40 deliver the climax of the 1692 timeline as Archie lunges at Caroline and wraps his hands around her throat to silence her. Before he can crush her windpipe, Jonas Reeve bursts in and shoots Archie dead with a pistol. When a panicked Caroline suggests alerting the authorities, Jonas reminds her that she is a convicted witch and he is a framed serial killer—the town will hang them both by sunrise. Instead, Jonas proposes an audacious plan: bury Archie and Molly in a single unmarked grave behind Pemberton, steal their money and clothes, and flee to a distant town pretending to be Archibald and Molly Eldridge. Taking Caroline‘s cat Gideon, they vanish into the night.

In Chapter 41 and Chapter 42, present-day Julia prepares to abandon Pemberton after being thrown out, but Henry rings with the forensic lab results from Boston. The pelvic bone Gram dug up is NOT from 1692—carbon dating proves it is only decades old, and the DNA test confirms that while the dead woman in the backyard is Julia‘s biological grandmother, Julia shares zero DNA with the living woman calling herself “Ethel”. Walking down the hallway to leave, Julia sees fresh writing scrawled across the wall reading “Julia get out now”. Instead of bolting to her car like a sensible human being, Julia grabs a flashlight at midnight to go rebury the pelvic bone in the backyard.

Chapter 43 and Chapter 44 spring the trap in the dark garden behind Pemberton as Julia digs in the dirt. The woman she has known her entire life as Great-Aunt Ethel steps out of the shadows aiming a handgun at her chest. “Ethel” is actually Celia Caine, the former maid. Decades ago, when the real Ethel gave birth to Julia‘s father out of wedlock, Celia smothered Ethel to death, buried her in the backyard, and convinced Letty (Gram) to let Celia assume Ethel‘s identity and inheritance. Letty agreed to the horrific cover-up so she could raise the newborn boy as her own son and shield her beloved sister’s memory from the scandal of an illegitimate pregnancy. To keep Ethel‘s parents (Gertrude) from spotting the impostor, Celia engineered a fake family feud that cut off all contact.

In Chapter 45 and Chapter 46, Mick Wheeler stumbles into the backyard confrontation and confesses the rest of the modern con. Pemberton isn’t haunted at all; Celia and Mick staged every single paranormal trick—stopping the grandfather clock at 3:41 a.m., flickering the lights, leaving muddy footprints, and weeping outside the door—to terrify Julia into fleeing before she uncovered Celia‘s stolen identity. However, Mick grew guilty over the decades and secretly planted Ethel‘s unmailed letters in the attic for Julia to find. Enraged by her former fiancé’s betrayal, Celia shoots Mick dead in the chest.

Chapter 47 and Chapter 48 see Celia hold Julia at gunpoint, forcing her to dig a fresh grave for Mick while outlining her plan to murder Julia and stage her disappearance. Julia bluffs that Henry Ziegler already knows the truth about Celia Caine, then breaks into a desperate sprint toward the back door of Pemberton, only to find Celia locked it. Cornered against the house as Celia raises the pistol to execute her, 85-year-old Gram (Letty) suddenly emerges from the darkness and smashes Celia across the skull with a heavy iron shovel, knocking the killer out cold.

In Chapter 49 and Chapter 50, police cruisers—already summoned by Henry—swarm the Pemberton estate and arrest Celia Caine. As paramedics tend to the scene, a lucid Gram explains that she watched Celia shoot Mick from the window and swears that the ghost of her real sister Ethel whispered in her ear, telling her to go outside and grab the shovel. The chapter leaves a lingering chill: while Mick and Celia faked the clock and the footprints, the voice on Alastair‘s tape and the whisper guiding Gram may have genuinely been Ethel crying out from her shallow grave.

Part IV: The Double Epilogue & The Portrait Secret (Epilogue 1 & Epilogue 2)

Epilogue (Present Day — One Year Later) wraps up the modern fallout as Celia Caine is convicted on two counts of first-degree murder for killing Ethel and Mick, earning a life sentence in prison. Julia‘s father secures power of attorney over the estate, Gram moves into a specialised memory-care facility, and Julia moves into town with Henry Ziegler after forgiving him for the APS call. The Woodhaven Museum officially purchases Pemberton. When police excavate the backyard to give the real Ethel a proper funeral, they unearth two additional 17th-century skeletons buried together—a man and a woman. Assuming the female skeleton is the martyred witch Caroline Eldridge, Julia erects a headstone for Caroline (dated 1672–1692) right beside the existing family graves of “Archibald” and “Molly,” while wondering who the unidentified male skeleton could possibly be.

Epilogue (1717) delivers McFadden’s final historical gut-punch, flashing back twenty-five years after the 1692 Woodhaven witch trials. Caroline and Jonas Reeve—having lived happily for a quarter-century under the stolen names of Archibald and Molly Eldridge, falling deeply in love and raising four children together—return to purchase the empty Pemberton estate. As they step inside the parlour, Jonas unveils a newly commissioned oil portrait of the two of them posing as “Archie and Molly”. Caroline selects the exact spot on the parlour wall to hang the painting, vowing to restore Pemberton and ensure nobody ever digs up the backyard where the real Archie and Molly are rotting. The reader realises what Julia never figured out: Julia isn’t descended from the traitorous maid Molly at all—she is the direct blood descendant of Caroline and Jonas, and the 1692 bones Julia just buried under Caroline‘s new headstone actually belong to her murderers, Molly and Archie.

Characters?

Character Name	Timeline	Role at Pemberton	Ultimate Fate	Moral Alignment
Julia Barlow	Present Day	Unemployed 27-year-old protagonist	Alive; living with Henry in Woodhaven	Passive Good
Caroline Eldridge	1692 / 1717	Archie‘s wife; accused witch	Survived; lived & died as “Molly Eldridge”	Resourceful Survivor
Celia Caine (“Ethel”)	1960s / Present	Former maid; identity thief & killer	Alive; serving life in prison for 2 murders	Ruthless Sociopath
Archibald “Archie” Eldridge	1692	Wealthy merchant; The Night Reaper	Dead; shot by Jonas, buried in yard	Pure Evil
Jonas Reeve	1692 / 1717	Framed outcast; Caroline‘s saviour	Survived; lived & died as “Archie Eldridge”	Chaotic Hero
Letitia “Gram” Barlow (Letty)	1960s / Present	Julia‘s adoptive grandmother (85)	Alive; residing in a dementia care facility	Morally Grey Accomplice
Molly Howe	1692	Scheming housemaid & false accuser	Dead; strangled by Archie, buried in yard	Opportunistic Antagonist
Mick Wheeler	1960s / Present	Groundskeeper & Celia‘s ex-fiancé	Dead; shot in the chest by Celia	Complicit Coward
Henry Ziegler	Present Day	Woodhaven Museum curator	Alive; dating Julia, runs Pemberton museum	Sceptical Ally
Ethel Eldridge (Real)	1960s	Letty‘s sister; Julia‘s bio-grandmother	Dead; smothered by Celia after childbirth	Tragic Victim
Hitty Atkins	1692	Market herbalist & Caroline‘s mentor	Dead; hanged in Town Square for witchcraft	Innocent Martyr
Deputy Oliver Strickland	1692	Abusive deputy sheriff & jailer	Dead; burned alive in jailhouse by Jonas	Sadistic Villain
Alastair Dixon	Present Day	Online-certified ghost hunter	Alive; unwittingly captures “Celia” EVP	Comic Relief

Julia Barlow

Julia Barlow serves as our 27-year-old present-day narrator, and frankly, she is one of the most frustratingly passive heroines in recent thriller memory. After losing her job and flat, she drifts into Pemberton and spends the vast majority of the book being driven around, handed clues by others, and reacting three chapters too late to obvious red flags.

Character Flaw: Walking into a pitch-black garden with a shovel at midnight right after reading a wall message telling her to get out is peak horror-movie stupidity.
Narrative Blindspot: Even in the epilogue, Julia never pieces together the portrait swap, earnestly placing Caroline‘s headstone over the bones of Molly Howe.

Caroline Eldridge

Caroline Eldridge anchors the 1692 timeline and single-handedly saves The Witch from collapsing under its modern-day contrivances. Initially trapped as a desperate wife faking a pregnancy to appease a cold husband, she demonstrates genuine moral courage by nursing Judith Hatch and publicly defending Hitty Atkins at the gallows.

Character Evolution: She transforms from a terrified Puritan wife into a pragmatic survivor willing to steal her dead abuser’s identity and fortune to build a new life.
Ultimate Irony: By living as “Molly Howe” from 1692 to her death, she accidentally tricks her own modern descendants into thinking they come from the woman who betrayed her.

Celia Caine (Fake “Ethel”)

Celia Caine is the cold-blooded engine of the modern plot—a former live-in maid in the 1960s who smothered her pregnant employer Ethel moments after childbirth and slid seamlessly into her skin. For over fifty years, Celia lived at Pemberton as “Great-Aunt Ethel,” hoarding the family estate and staging cheap ghost tricks with Mick to chase Julia off.

Logical Breakdown: While her ruthlessness in shooting Mick works on a pulp level, the idea that Celia fooled the town and lived beside Letty for half a century by starting a convenient family feud stretches believability to the breaking point.

Archibald “Archie” Eldridge

Archibald Eldridge is a textbook McFadden hypocrite: a wealthy, pious pillar of 1692 Woodhaven who lectures his wife on modesty while moonlighting as the “Night Reaper” serial strangler. He murders his first wife Temperance, slaughters local girls like Leonora Rowley, impregnates his housemaid Molly, and strangles Molly when she demands legitimacy.

Poetic Justice: After refusing to speak a single word to save Caroline at her witch trial, Archie is shot dead by Jonas and dumped in an unmarked backyard pit while his killer takes his name, house, and wife.

Jonas Reeve

Jonas Reeve begins as a classic gothic red herring—the brooding, long-haired village pariah framed for the Night Reaper killings after being spotted near Leonora Rowley‘s body. Beneath the scowl, Jonas is fiercely loyal, honouring his deathbed promise to Hitty Atkins by burning down the jailhouse, killing Deputy Strickland, shooting Archie, and masterminding the identity swap that gives Caroline four children and a second life.

Letitia “Gram” Barlow (Letty)

Letitia “Gram” Barlow is the most morally complex and heartbreaking figure in the book. At 85, her dementia leaves her unravelling knitting and mistaking Julia for Ethel, yet in the 1960s, a young Letty made a monstrous bargain with Celia Caine. To hide Ethel‘s out-of-wedlock pregnancy and raise Julia‘s father as her own son, Letty protected her sister’s killer for fifty years—before finally redeeming herself by caving Celia‘s head in with a shovel.

Molly Howe

Molly Howe is Caroline‘s pious, spiteful 1692 housemaid who weaponises Puritan superstition to steal her mistress’s life. Carrying on a secret affair with Archie, Molly parades into court wearing Caroline‘s peacock-blue dress and fabricates eyewitness accounts of devil worship to send Caroline to the gallows—only to be strangled by Archie the moment she becomes an inconvenient pregnant liability.

Mick Wheeler

Mick Wheeler is Pemberton’s longtime groundskeeper and Celia Caine‘s former fiancé. He spends the novel winding stopped clocks and gaslighting Julia with fake paranormal stunts to protect Celia‘s secret, but a late attack of conscience prompts him to leave Ethel‘s letters in the attic—earning him a fatal bullet in the chest from Celia.

Henry Ziegler

Henry Ziegler is the Woodhaven Museum curator in suspenders who initially cares far more about Pemberton’s 17th-century door knocker than Julia‘s feelings. Though their romance is paper-thin and undercooked, Henry is the only character with a functioning brain, running the carbon-14 and DNA tests that expose the fraud and calling the cops in time to save Julia.

Ethel Eldridge (Real), Howard & Gertrude Eldridge

The real Ethel Eldridge never appears alive, yet her tragedy haunts every page. Left pregnant when her lover Howard died in the Vietnam War, she wrote two unmailed letters to her mother Gertrude Eldridge before being smothered by her maid Celia after giving birth to Julia‘s father. Her restless spirit provides the book’s only hint of true supernatural intervention, whispering to Gram to pick up the shovel.

Hitty Atkins

Hitty Atkins is the kindly market herbalist who supplies Caroline with sage and black cohosh fertility tonics and treats her like a daughter. Targeted by malicious town gossip led by Elias Fenn, Hitty is convicted of witchcraft and hanged in Town Square, serving as the emotional catalyst for Caroline‘s rebellion.

Deputy Oliver Strickland, Mistress Strickland, Sheriff Bixby & Magistrate Putman

This quartet represents the corrupt patriarchal machinery of 1692 Woodhaven:

Deputy Oliver Strickland: A sadistic bully who terrorises his rail-thin wife (Mistress Strickland), strip-searches and propositions Caroline in her cell, fakes a needle test in court, and is justly burned alive by Jonas.
Sheriff Bixby: Strickland‘s father-in-law who enforces the witch hunts, denies Caroline visitors, and executes Hitty without remorse.
Magistrate Putman: The presiding judge who eagerly accepts spectral evidence and sentences Caroline to hang.

Alastair Dixon

Alastair Dixon is a comedic paranormal investigator armed with an online certificate, a K2 meter, and dodgy alarm pods. While his slapstick presence feels tonally bizarre inside a thriller about hangings and elder abuse, his EVP recorder accidentally captures the crucial “Celia” audio clue.

Judith Hatch, Hiram Hatch, Dr. Shaylor & Elias Fenn

These supporting 1692 townsfolk illustrate how quickly neighbours turn lethal during a moral panic:

Judith & Hiram Hatch: After Hiram offers his horse to save his dying wife Judith, Caroline breaks Judith‘s fever with compresses—yet neither speaks up when that exact healing is used to condemn Caroline as a witch.
Dr. Shaylor: An incompetent quack who botches Judith‘s bloodletting and blames her seizure on the devil to protect his ego.
Elias Fenn: The loudmouthed town butcher whose vicious gossip condemns both Hitty and Caroline.

Temperance, Leonora Rowley & Gideon

Temperance & Leonora Rowley: Archie‘s silenced victims—his first wife Temperance (whose murder he disguised as a fever) and 16-year-old Leonora Rowley (whom Jonas loved and was framed for strangling).
Gideon: The stray cat Caroline feeds despite Molly calling him a devil’s creature; Gideon escapes Woodhaven with Caroline and Jonas and dies peacefully in Caroline‘s arms ten years later.

Compare with other works

How does The Witch stack up against Freida McFadden’s backlist and heavyweights in the gothic/dual-timeline thriller space? Here is the head-to-head breakdown:

Book Title & Author	Structural Hook	Where The Witch Wins	Where The Witch Loses
*The Housemaid* (Freida McFadden)	Claustrophobic domestic thriller with a mid-book POV flip.	Richer historical atmosphere and far less cartoonishly evil modern rich people.	Lacks the razor-sharp, claustrophobic pacing and tight plotting of The Housemaid.
*The Divorce* & *Dear Debbie* (Freida McFadden)	Recent 2026 standalone domestic thrillers.	Infinitely more likable characters (especially Caroline) and a vastly superior ending.	Still recycles McFadden’s juvenile inner monologues in Julia‘s chapters.
*Never Lie* (Freida McFadden)	Isolated estate thriller with hidden recordings.	The 1692 witch trial storyline carries real historical weight.	Never Lie executes its house-bound psychological tension without relying on fake ghost props.
*Home Before Dark* (Riley Sager)	Woman returns to a “haunted” family estate with a dual timeline.	Faster, punchier chapters designed for a single-sitting binge.	Sager executes the “rational explanation for a haunting” trope with way fewer plot holes.
*The Crucible* / *Hour of the Witch* (Chris Bohjalian)	Authentic 17th-century New England witch-hunt drama.	Delivers a crowd-pleasing, pulp-fiction revenge fantasy ending for the accused witch.	Bohjalian’s prose and period research make McFadden’s “verily” dialogue look amateurish.

Achievement

Even when critics roast her prose, Freida McFadden’s commercial juggernaut numbers are completely unmatched in modern publishing:

90 Million Copies Sold Milestone: Within a week of The Witch hitting shelves on October 6, 2026, McFadden’s publisher Sourcebooks officially announced she surpassed 90 million copies sold worldwide across print, eBook, and audio formats.
Goodreads Explosion in 10 Days: Within its first ten days of release, The Witch racked up over 67,607 ratings and 6,938 written reviews on Goodreads, holding a solid 4.09 to 4.11 out of 5 average rating.
Massive Active Readership: Over 84,953 Goodreads users marked the book as “Currently Reading” during launch week, with 34,000+ logged completions in a single seven-day window, making it the #1 Most Read Book on the platform.
Rating Distribution Breakdown: Out of nearly 68,000 early readers, 75% awarded it 4 or 5 stars (31% 5-star, 44% 4-star), while 19% gave it 3 stars and 4% handed out 1 or 2 stars.
Global Reach & Awards Pedigree: Released simultaneously in hardcover (352 pages), trade paperback (320 pages, RRP $34.99 AUD), Kindle Unlimited, and a 9-hour-31-minute dual-narrated audiobook voiced by Saskia Maarleveld and Marin Ireland, the novel builds on McFadden’s status as a TIME 100 Most Influential Person of 2026, International Thriller Writers Award winner, and author translated into 45+ languages.

3 Glaring Plot Holes & Unanswered Questions

Before you close the book on Pemberton, let us dissect the three biggest logical craters that have thriller forums arguing non-stop:

Why on earth did Letty go along with Celia’s con for 50 years?
We are expected to believe that after Celia smothered Ethel in her bed, Letty agreed to let the murderer wear her dead sister’s clothes, live in her house, and inherit half the estate just to hide an out-of-wedlock baby in the late 1960s. Why didn’t Letty and Ethel just pretend the baby was Letty‘s without Celia murdering anyone, or why didn’t Letty call the police the day after the funeral?
The Physical Agility of Octogenarians:
Half the spooky occurrences in Pemberton—creeping around the attic, leaving small footprints in the mud, hanging a noose in a tree, scrawling warnings on the wall—require nimble midnight stealth from an 80-year-old woman (Celia) and an ageing groundskeeper (Mick) whom the book spends 300 pages portraying as frail.
The Wrong Headstone Irony:
In the present-day epilogue, Julia finds a female skeleton and a male skeleton buried near Ethel, assumes the woman is Caroline, and gives her a grave marker dated 1672–1692. Because Julia never learns about the 1692 identity swap, she has actually just built a shrine to Molly Howe (the traitor) and Archibald Eldridge (the Night Reaper), while the real Caroline and Jonas have been resting peacefully under the “Archie and Molly” stones for three hundred years.

What is your final call on The Witch—is the 1692 storyline enough to forgive the ridiculous modern plot holes, or did Julia‘s passivity drive you up the wall? Sound off in the comments below!

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