Halloween in Essex and the Mystery and Suspense creative writing course at old Ratchette Hall is off to a satisfyingly creepy start. But things take a turn for the worse when the course administrator is discovered dead, clutching a marble finger to his chest. For why would anyone, undead or alive, want to kill mild-mannered Graham?

Luckily Rosie Strange and Sam Stone are on the case. Soon, however, they are digging up more questions than answers: who are the unearthly howls emanating from neighbouring Witch Wood every night? How has a stone crusader, on display in the church, managed to lose a finger? And, more sinister yet, why is one of the tombs missing a corpse?

​Ghosts, witches and all kinds of creepy things seem to congregate in the town of Adder's Fork, where the world-renowned Essex Witch Museum has its home. It's not long before owner Rosie Strange and curator Sam Stone must take matters into their own hands.

​It’s summer in Adders Fork. The sun is out, the sky is blue and things are going swimmingly for Rosie Strange, thank you very much. But when developers roll into the sleepy village and move a centuries-old boulder, said to mark the grave of a notorious witch, all hell breaks out.

Within hours a slew of peculiar phenomena descend upon the village causing unimaginable havoc. When a severed head is discovered atop the boulder, the locals can take no more and storm the Witchcraft Museum to demand action. Could an ancient treasure offer a motive for murder? Can Rosie and Sam unravel the mystery? And what is worse - as the body count starts to mount and the hysteria rises, can Rosie resolve some mysteries of her own?

Something strange is happening at the La Fleur restaurant. Bonnet-clad apparitions pass through walls, blood leaks from ceilings and rats besiege the dining room. But before the Essex Witch Museum investigative team Rosie Strange and Sam Stone can look into these strange sights, events turn darker - for La Fleur’s chef has been strung up and slaughtered like a pig. And the only witness, the owner’s daughter Mary, swears blind a ghost is to blame... Rosie and Sam must find out what’s happening before Mary takes the fall, but intuitions and tip-offs lead them stumbling into the dark waters of the past, exposing a wider conspiracy, as well as secrets all Rosie’s own.

Rosie Strange doesn't believe in ghosts or witches. Not at all. So it’s no surprise that when she inherits the ramshackle Essex Witch Museum from her grandfather Septimus, her first thought is to sell it and run. Still, the museum exerts a curious pull. There’s the eccentric academic who asks for her help in tracking down the bones of Ursula Cadence, a witch long since put to death. And there’s curator Sam Stone, a man about whom Rosie can’t decide if he’s tiresomely annoying or extremely captivating. Her plans to sell the museum might be delayed, just for a while.

Soon Rosie and Sam find themselves embroiled in a centuries-old mystery, involving demonic possession, a missing skeleton and a local witch hunt in which the evils of the past come with their own real, and very present, danger. Inspired by the real-life epidemic of witch hunts that broke out in the village of St Osyth in sixteenth-century Essex, STRANGE MAGIC is the first in a new series about witches, magic ...and Essex Girls.