The Witch’s Grave-Shirley Damsgaard

The Witch’s Grave
Shirley Damsgaard
Avon, Jan 2009, $6.99
ISBN: 9780061493430

Librarian Ophelia Jensen and her beloved grandmother Abby live in a small Iowa town. People who meet the pair assume they are ordinary Midwesterners. A few locals know that they are witches and psychics just like their ancestors. Ophelia has not always felt comfortable with her gifts although they have helped her solve several homicides (see WITCH WAY TO MURDER and THE WITCH IS DEAD). Currently she is in a happy mood because of her dreams of a new man entering her life.

At a library fundraiser, Ophelia meets former horror writer Stephen Larsen and they are attracted to one another. When they go for a walk near the woods, a shot is fired and he begins to bleed from his chest. He is stabilized at the hospital, but later someone shoots at Ophelia, but misses. The psychic begins to dream of a French Resistance fighter Madeleine and her lover Henrick, who loves her back but refuses to marry her. Abby believes Stephen and Ophelia were once Madeleine and Henrick; her inquiries into the past lead to a present illegal immigrant ring who wants the trio silenced.

In their sixth appearance, Ophelia is accepting her powers that are getting stronger as she understands her desire to find out who the sniper is requires full use of her talents. Matters turn even more corrupted when a politician running for office is shot at and his aide killed. Thus THE WITCH’S GRAVE is a multilayered paranormal whodunit in which the WW II European past and the twenty-first century Hawkeye State converge through Ophelia and Stephen inside a fascinating supernatural amateur sleuth mystery.
Harriet Klausner