Salem's Child

Mississippi native Robert W. Walker is a graduate of Northwestern University. He’s been a novelist since the mid-1980s, contributing to numerous genres like crime, horror, urban fantasy, and mystery. Using his own name and pseudonyms like Geoffrey Caine, Stephen Robertson, and Glenn Hale, Walker has created and authored over a dozen series titles and numerous stand-alone works for publishers like Jove, Pinnacle, and Leisure. Our only experience with the writer was the four-book crime-fiction series Decoy, written under his Robertson pen name. Wanting a summer horror read, I chose his 1987 Leisure paperback, Salem’s Child.

The novel’s locale is Danvers, Massachusetts, historically known as Salem Village. In the opening pages, a young boy is running from a trailer and stumbles upon a field of old bones. His father ends up being electrocuted, and there’s some importance placed on these bones in relation to witches who were burned at the stake in the 1600s. The boy, whose name is Richard Carrier (let's call him Dick...Dick Carrier) grows up and begins a quest to avenge the death of these witches by targeting the descendants of the persecutors.

The narrative works like a crime-fiction mystery as Lieutenant Stephen Price, a Boston police detective, becomes the story's central investigator. He journeys to Danvers to look into a string of murders that may somehow be connected to the town. He teams with his nerdy partner and the town's quirky sheriff to flip stones and read a lot of old texts – riveting stuff. He falls in love with a woman named Amy, who is an archaeologist with a psychology background. She has her own vendetta with the town and this mysterious killer.

At 400 pages, Salem's Child plods along in this murky criminal investigation. Unlike a traditional horror paperback, the body count is fairly low, and the murders are mostly off the page. The style and presentation - slow-burn investigative mystery – failed to keep my attention. Maybe you'll have a better experience. Get the digital or audio edition HERE (re-titled as Abaddon: Salem's Child).