This time it's not a witch put on trial because of a community's mass hysteria but a man named Jack St. Bride. He has a doctorate in history, knows the question to every Jeopardy answer and was once a teacher and soccer coach but now feels lucky just to have a job washing dishes in a diner in Salem Falls, New Hampshire. That's because he was just released from prison.
Jack had taken his lawyer's advice to plead guilty to a lesser charge after being falsely accused of raping a student in another town. But now he must register as a sex offender in Salem Falls, and soon everyone in town is talking about him and warning their daughters to stay away from him.
By this time, however, Addie Peabody, his boss at the diner, has already fallen in love with him. Addie herself had been raped years before — as it happens, by the cop who will eventually arrest Jack for the same crime — and she is torn over what to believe when a Salem Falls teenager accuses Jack of raping her.
Gillian, the girl, had been playing at witchcraft with friends on the night in question, thus creating a situation where a "witch" falsely accuses someone else of a crime, reversing the Salem situation. Also, it is Jack who bewitches, because of his good looks, teenage girls into falling in love with him and turning their imaginations into a false reality. I don't think I am giving anything away, for readers will be confident of Jack's innocence all along, even though the evidence appears to be stacked against him.
Most the rest of the novel takes place in the courtroom, where Jack's attorney must first convince himself, then the jury, that his client did not really rape Gilliam. But if not Jack, then who? In the end, that is the novel's most enticing mystery, unresolved, or even mentioned, until the very last sentence.
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