Katherine Howe

Connie Goodwin should be spending her summer doing research for her Ph. D. dissertation in American History. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie's grandmother's abandoned home near Salem, she's compelled to help. While exploring the dusty bookshelves, Connie discovers an ancient key containing a brittle piece of paper on which is written two words: Deliverance Dane. And Connie begins to do some research... (Bestseller)

"Connie Goodwin is an expert on America's fractured past with witchcraft. A young, tenure-track professor in Boston, she's earned career success by studying the history of magic in colonial America--especially women's home recipes and medicines--and by exposing society's threats against women fluent in those skills. But beyond her studies, Connie harbors a secret: She is the direct descendant of a woman tried as a witch in Salem, an ancestor whose...

"The story of the Astors is an extraordinary but true tale of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention--and of cunning, determination, hard work, hubris, infighting, and greed. One of the wealthiest men to have ever lived, John Jacob Astor first arrived in New York in 1783 and built a fortune through a ruthless expansion of his beaver trapping business, which he grew into an empire through real estate that enriched him at the expense of Manhattan's...