Internet review #1: On Goodreads, Charlotte wrote this in 2019: 'I was expecting a thrilling Pagan mystery, potentially delving into past timelines and the age of suspicion and witchcraft.

If you're really sore, I'll mail you some nail-clippings and you can make a Papergreat witch bottle to get revenge. She ends up with someone named William, who's not much better. She certainly had it in for her, what with killing her baby and all.' Abigail did that for Ann Leigh who began to spit pins afterwards, which must have been a little trying. You put bits of your enemy in it - nail-clippings and suchlike - and boil it up. It's a witch bottle, with the face of a bearded gent on the front of it.

Humphrey Sloane mansplaining things to Tamar: 'You Lunnon ladies are terrible iggerant.

Random sentence from the middle #2: Humphrey was not at his best in moments of crisis.

Random sentence from the middle #1: Abigail's cottage had been built in Elizabethan times Tamar, for all she was small, had to stoop to avoid knocking her head on the low beams.What's Meadway Bois? The tiny (and fictitious) English village at the center of this tale.First sentence: It was a magnificent mid-June day of the best summer of the century when Tamar Brown arrived at Lanchester, the station for Meadway Bois.Year: First printing, August 1967 (originally published in 1961).Number on spine: 7 (presumably its number within the Black Magic Novels of Terror).

Additional cover text: A Black Magic Novel of Terror.Cover blurb: A haunting mystery of love and evil 'filled with real horror, suspense, eeriness.' ⁠- San Francisco Chronicle.Author, per cover: 'Charity Blackstock writing as Paula Allardyce'.The actual author was Ursula Torday, whose name's letters could have been reworked to create Saturday Lour, which would have been yet another good pen name.

And, regarding the author: This cover states that it's 'Charity Blackstock writing as Paula Allardyce.' Those are both pseudonyms, actually, so it's kind of weird to have one pen name writing as another pen name (and disclosing it as such).

The Torturer by Peter Saxon