A secret chamber.

A mysterious shipwreck.

A murder in the desolate salt marshes.

A seemingly straightforward private case turns out to be much more complicated-and sinister-than Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast ever could possess anticipated.

Pendergast, regarding his ward Constance Greene, travels towards the quaint seaside community of Exmouth, Massachusetts, to research the theft of the priceless wine collection. But inside the wine cellar, they find something considerably more disturbing: a about Crimson Shore bricked-up market that once held a crumbling skeleton.

Pendergast and Constance soon learn that Exmouth is a city with a very dark and troubled history, which skeleton may be only the initial hint of an ancient transgression, kept key all these years. But they will discover which the sins of days gone by are still very much alive. Local story holds that through the 1692 witch studies in Salem, the real witches escaped, fleeing north to Exmouth and settling deep in the encompassing salt marshes, where they continued to apply their wicked arts. Then, a murdered corpse turns up in the marshes. The just clue is some secret carvings. Could these demonic icons bear some regards to the historic witches’ colony, longer thought to be abandoned?

A terrible evil lurks beneath the surface of this sleepy seaside town-one with deep roots in Exmouth’s grim history. And it may be that Constance, with her own troubled past, is the only 1 who really comprehends the awful danger that she, Pendergast, and the citizens of Exmouth must encounter .