Bloodline

Description

Three centuries ago, twelve people sent a stranger to the gallows. Now their last living descendants are dying in order — and the man doing it swears he’s lifting a curse, not casting one.

The deaths scattered across New England seem unconnected until genealogist Sela Marwood maps them onto a single 1690s trial record. Each victim traces straight back to one of the jurors who condemned an accused woman to die. Someone is hunting the bloodline of that verdict, certain that ending it will close a wound the town has carried for three hundred years.

Sela took the contract for the family-history angle. Then she finds her own name a few branches down the same tree, and a quiet, courteous man arrives to explain, almost apologetically, why it has to be all of them. Including her.

Cold drafts and tallow smoke haunt this slow gothic dread, where the old crime might still be owed, and the cure might be worse than the curse. Walton lets the dead trial breathe through three centuries. The question that lingers isn’t who’s killing them. It’s whether he’s right.

Trace your family back far enough. See whose verdict you inherited.