Book Review: The Witch Hunter by Virginia Bocker

Title:The Witch Hunter
Author: Virginia Bocker
Publisher: Orchard Books
Release Date: June 4th 2015
Synopsis: Sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Grey doesn't look dangerous. A tiny, blonde, wisp of a girl shouldn't know how to poison a wizard and make it look like an accident. Or take out ten necromancers with a single sword and a bag of salt. Or kill a man using only her thumb. But things are not always as they appear. Elizabeth is one of the best witch hunters in Anglia and a member of the king's elite guard, devoted to rooting out witchcraft and bringing those who practice it to justice. And in Anglia, the price of justice is high: death by burning.
When Elizabeth is accused of being a witch herself, she's arrested and thrown in prison. The king declares her a traitor and her life is all but forfeit. With just hours before she's to die at the stake, Elizabeth gets a visitor - Nicholas Perevil, the most powerful wizard in Anglia. He offers her a deal: he will free her from prison and save her from execution if she will track down the wizard who laid a deadly curse on him.
As Elizabeth uncovers the horrifying facts about Nicholas's curse and the unwitting role she played in its creation, she is forced to redefine the differences between right and wrong, friends and enemies, love and hate... and life and death.

Review: MAGIC...HISTORY...A MASKED BALL what more could you want. I guess you could say this book did it for me, especially being set in a Historical period I LOVE.

Lets, as we always do, take a moment to appreciate this cool cover! Have you taken that moment? Well do it again. I love the ways that the runes and the symbols slink around the edges of the page all suggestive and then that burning, almost voodoo doll like figure all striking in the middle of the page = sexy cover. I feel this is getting weird now so back to the booooook.

This can probably be described as a fun read, and I feel like it was just the kind of book I needed. I found I was flying through it, I got taken up in the story, and though you could kind of see where it was going in parts, the past was nice and fast and I was enjoying the book.

You're told the year (1588) and then the aesthetics of the world builds itself in your (well my) mind and I think this is great because it made it your book, your England you were travelling through.  But it was also a familiar land, and I loved the elements of my London that were drawn in, especially the mention of Harrow-on-the-Hill...that did make me laugh! I liked the variety of characters, they were a little cliché, but they were still real characters that you could get behind and side with and who I still want to journey with...more on that to come. It was like you were part of the gang and that was nice.

I liked how the magic was built on traditional magic, that sort of pagan ritual, rather than being fantastical and the witch burnings emphasised the historical nature of the story. As part of one of my History modules at uni I studied witchcraft in medieval England, so this brought a lot for that back, increased my investment in the book and I find it a fascinating period of history and I'm glad that was the basis for this. I also now want to go and read more about it!

Then you get to the last page and it's like book there's more to come...YES (little internal whoop of excitement when I read that).  I enjoyed this and I'm looking forward to more of it.