Met By Moonlight [Mass Market Paperback]

Edghill's novel is a historical novel, a romance and a work of fiction. Don't expect too much from it, but also don't reject it out of hand because it has the word romance attached. It is no less well written than her Bast mysteries or her science fiction and fantasy.

Diana Crossways (yes, Diana of the Crossroads is one of the aspects the Wiccan Goddess) was alone in her small pagan bookstore in Salem Massachusetts, when a mysterious motorcycle courier delivers a package in the middle of a thunderstorm on October 31. When she opens the package she discovers that it is a valuable three hundred-year-old, handwritten grimoire with no information as to why she had received it or what she was to do with it. Just as she is examining the book there is a bolt of lightning that blows the electricity, then another that send her spinning into the storm. When she can see and hear again, she is not in Salem. She is in a midnight, summer wood under a full moon, confronting a mysterious sensual shadowy figure who both attracts and repels her.

Fleeing, she stumbles into a coven of witches, who take her for a visitor from inside the Hollow Hills, a creature of faery, because of her mysterious and foreign appearance. They identify the book she is still clutching as the grammarie they had given to one of their members who had been slain four years ago. She is invited on the strength of this as well as her pagan jewelry to join in their ceremony.

One of the members, Abigail Fortune, undertakes to provide shelter for her, claiming Diana to be her niece Anne Mallow, come from London. Abigail further gifts Diana with the information that she is no longer in 20th century Massachusetts, but 17th century England. Oliver Cromwell has taken King Charles I in keeping and the Puritans are changing the face of religion in England. More specifically, Matthew Hopkins, the self appointed witchfinder general, with his companions, John Sterne and Mary Phillips (the Three Unspotted Lambs of the Lord) are on the prowl seeking out malignants (witches) to be destroyed to the Greater Glory of the Lord and the financial gain of the witchfinders.

While Diana waits in Dame Fortune's cottage outside the village of Talitho, hoping another turn of the seasons would allow her to return to her own world and wondering who the mysterious figure is she had seen on her first entrance to the 17th century, unseen forces set in motion events that draw Matthew Hopkins to this small village in rural England.

When Hopkins arrives, he brings not just his companions, Sterne and Phillips, but also a man known as Upright-Before-the-Lord Makepeace who seems more a prisoner than a willing servant. Upright-Before-the-Lord is Hopkin's hell hound, a creature he regards as less than human, redeemed by Hopkins from damnation, used by him to hunt down those true Wiccans whose presence give his lies about innocent people (made in order to bolster his credibility and line his pockets) some credibility. In reality, Upright is a creature of the fog and the shadow and the night, bound hopelessly to Hopkins, but seeing in Diana his destiny.

How Hopkins tries to destroy Diana and the coven who welcomed her and how Upright struggles against Hopkins' conditioning in an effort to protect her make this book more than a romance. It's a historical fantasy novel dealing with one of the more interesting sidelines of English history.

Diana Crossways (yes, Diana of the Crossroads is one of the aspects the Wiccan Goddess) was alone in her small pagan bookstore in Salem Massachusetts, when a mysterious motorcycle courier delivers a package in the middle of a thunderstorm on October 31. When she opens the package she discovers that it is a valuable three hundred-year-old, handwritten grimoire with no information as to why she had received it or what she was to do with it. Just as she is examining the book there is a bolt of lightning that blows the electricity, then another that send her spinning into the storm. But when she can see and hear again, she is not in Salem. She is in a midnight, summer wood under a full moon, confronting a mysterious and attractive figure who both attracts and repels her.

She flees and stumbles into a coven of witches, who take her for a visitor from inside the Hollow Hills, a creature of faery, because of her mysterious and foreign appearance. They identify the book she is still clutching as the grammarie they had given to one of their members who had been slain four years ago. She is invited on the strength of this as well as her pagan jewelry to join in their ceremony.

One of the members, Abigail Fortune, undertakes to provide shelter for her, naming Diana her niece Anne Mallow, come from London. Abigail further gives Diana with the information that she is no longer in 20th century Massachusetts, but 17th century England. Oliver Cromwell has taken King Charles I in keeping and the Puritans are changing the face of religion in England. More specifically, Matthew Hopkins, the self appointed witchfinder general, with his companions, John Sterne and Mary Phillips (the Three Unspotted Lambs of the Lord) are on the prowl seeking out malignants (witches) to be destroyed to the Greater Glory of the Lord and the financial gain of the witchfinders.

While Diana waits outside the village of Talitho, hoping another turn of the seasons would allow her to return to her own world and wondering who the mysterious figure is she had seen on her first entrance to the 17th century, unseen forces set in motion events that draw Matthew Hopkins to this small village in rural England.

When Hopkins arrives, he brings not just his companions, Sterne and Phillips, but also a man known as Upright-Before-the-Lord Makepeace who seems more a prisoner than a willing servant. Upright-Before-the-Lord is Hopkin's hell hound, a creature he regards as less than human, redeemed by Hopkins from damnation, used by him to hunt down those true Wiccans whose presence give his lies about innocent people (made in order to bolster his credibility and line his pockets) some credibility. In reality, Upright is a creature of the fog and the shadow and the night, bound hopelessly to Hopkins, but seeing in Diana his destiny.

How Hopkins tries to destroy Diana and the coven who welcomed her and how Upright struggles against Hopkins' conditioning in an effort to protect her make this book more than a romance. It's a historical fantasy novel dealing with one of the more interesting sidelines of English history.