I own more than a dozen witch-hunt related books, and have a deep fascination in the subject, but I simply couldn't finish this disturbing book.

My biggest problem with this book are the many and graphic descriptions of rape and child molestation. I understand completely the potential argument that the author is simply trying to retain historical details, and that these travesties cannot be glossed over and lost in the mists of history. I completely agree that history must not be whitewashed to obscure the evildoers of our past.

However, having said that, the book seems to take great pleasure in describing every possible detail surrounding every rape and child molestation it covers. Many of these stories are not even "historical" - the author has taken a historical fact ("Town was sacked; women raped.") and churned out lurid rape scenes based on what probably happened to someone, somewhere, during this historical incident. More than halfway through the book, I felt like I was irrevocably lost in the literary equivalent of a snuff movie where violence was being recorded purely for violence's sake.

Even if you look past the graphic content, I have to take serious issue with the author's lack of reliable sources. Much of this book reads as fiction, and many incidents seem apocryphal at best. I could not find anywhere online a confirmation of nor a reference to the related incident detailing Torquemada's beating at the hands of the vengeful gypsies - and my fiction-meter was further peaked by the author's insistence that Torquemada had all the witnesses to this intriguing incident killed (So how do we know the story??). This is one example of many, and I simply cannot suppress the feeling that this book is poorly researched and disturbingly obsessed with sexual violence. I rarely ever resell a book, but this one is going to Half-Price Books and with my condolences to its next hapless owner.

Although I do have a passing interest in the subject matter of this book, I might not have purchased this one, had it not been for its author. I have read several of this author's books and they are extremely well-written. This book is definitely no exception. Although, as can be expected, the author focuses on witches and witch hunts mainly of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there is a chapter covering the mid-twentieth century Nazi period. As usual, the writing is clear, engaging, breathlessly exciting in places and occasionally tongue-in-cheek in the way certain things and events are described. This makes this masterpiece very difficult to put down. The descriptions given of the methods used to torture supposed witches, and their effects on the human body, are very graphic; so, no punches are pulled, as it were. I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in this dark chapter in human history, or even in history in general, as told by a master raconteur.