On a beach, Boston journalist Theresa Osborne finds a bottle thrown up by the sea with a love letter from a man to his dead wife. Theresa, a divorcee searching for love, is so moved by it she tracks the man to his yacht in North Carolina and a romance follows. By the author of The Notebook.

In 1704, in the English settlement of Deerfield, Massachusetts, eleven-year-old Mercy and her family and neighbors are captured by Mohawk Indians and their French allies, and forced to march through bitter cold to French Canada, where some adapt to new lives and some still hope to be ransomed.

Martha Carrier was one of the first women to be accused, tried and hanged as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts. Like her mother, young Sarah Carrier is bright and willful, openly challenging the small, brutal world in which they live. Often at odds with one another, mother and daughter are forced to stand together against the escalating hysteria of the trials and the superstitious tyranny that led to the torture and imprisonment of more than 200 people...