Devil's Key - Elisabeth Graves

'[this] Florida native breathes life into all her characters -- dead or alive.'   --St. Augustine Record

Lucy Fowler plans to spend winter break on an island off the coast of Florida, to finish writing her thesis.  She needs one last interview with an elderly midwife.  Lucy almost cancels the trip after she's brutally assaulted on campus.  But in the end she  goes, hoping work will be therapeutic.

On remote, isolated Ibo Key, Lucy learns midwife Esther Day is now confined to a psychiatric ward.  She also learns that there was once a thriving black community, Revelation, on the island. Its residents all vanished one night long ago.  Lucy decides to write about the ghost town, but no one will talk about what happened. Eventually, she uncovers the terrible story behind the town's destruction. Esther's rival, Soulange, once owned a mysterious book . . . a centuries old grimoire revealing  the arcana of Obeah. An odd little man tells Lucy the island is cursed. That every man, woman, and child on it will soon die.  And she begins to see glimpses of the past.

But by then she's stranded, trapped by a killer hurricane. To escape she must face her own connection to both the victims and perpetrators of a long-ago massacre . . . a crime so monstrous it invites the arrival of an evil old as time.

Devil's Key was originally published by Egmont Boker, Oslo, in 1999 as Svart Frikt. This Northampton House Press trade paperback edition is the first in the English language.