Revenants
*Starred Review* This atmospheric novel is set in 1689, 14 years after King Philip's War. That bloody conflict pitted Native Americans against English colonists. Now in the town of Cold Marsh, two young women have gone missing. The stern, ancient minister warns the townspeople that the disappearances are the work of the devil. When a third young woman vanishes, the men organize a search party, with the woman's fiance among them, and set out into the woods. But what they find there - evidence of a massacre against Native Americans that the older men had participated in - totally unnerves them, unleashing a torrent of guilt and sorrow that the repressed men can barely acknowledge, for they are "equally terrified of forest and town, the world without and the world within." Both of those worlds are eloquently captured by Mills in this stunning debut novel. Readers are swept into the towering forests of colonial New England right along with the settlers as Mills calls up both the majesty of stately oaks and chestnuts and mist-laden scenes of terrified Native American women and children who were slaughtered where they stood. Otherworldly fiction from a promising new talent. --Joanne Wilkinson