Book excerpt: What had a toadstone ring got to do with the homicides that Detective Sergeant Lisa Pharies found herself investigating? With the help of her mentor, the now-retired detective inspector Heath, her journey leads back to the curse Beth Simkins uttered on the Ravenscroft family as she was being burnt at the stake, accused of witchcraft, four hundred years ago by England's witch-finder general, Mathew Hopkins. Has a descendant of the witch, the frail Jenny Simkins, anything to do with the burnt body of a Ravenscroft or the murder of an Oxford professor who wore a toadstone ring? Detective Sergeant Pharies is confronted by dark secrets of land ownership alongside the river in Danesbury that spans four centuries to the present day.