Hester Fox

Before she wrote fiction, Hester Fox looked after other people's collections as a maintenance technician in historic houses and art museums, including Historic New England and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. She holds a master's degree in historical archaeology and studied medieval history and art history, and the training shows in novels set almost entirely in the New England of her own upbringing. The Witch of Willow Hall, her first, was published by Graydon House in 2018: Lydia Montrose, told she descends from the witches of Salem, is moved out to a country estate in 1821 after a family scandal in Boston, and the house turns out not to be quiet. The Orphan of Cemetery Hill followed in 2020 and gives us Tabby, a young woman who hears the recently dead, living beside the caretaker of a Boston burial ground in 1844 as grave robbery becomes a trade in the city. Fox lives in a small mill town in Massachusetts.