Marie du Trieux, a tavern keeper with a salty tongue and a heart of gold, struggles as she navigates love and loss, Native wars, and possible banishment by authorities in the unruly trading port of New Amsterdam, an outpost of the Dutch West India Company. In New England, John Tinker, merchant and assistant to a renowned alchemist and eventual leader of Connecticut Colony, must come to terms with a family tragedy of dark proportions, all the while supporting his mentor’s secret quest to find the Northwest Passage, a desired trading route purported to mystically unite the East with the West. As the lives of Marie and John become intertwined through friendship and trade, a search for justice of a Dutch woman accused of witchcraft in Hartford puts them on a collision course affecting not only their own destinies but also the fate of colonial America.

For Alissa, life was once sweet, wrapped in the loving kindness of her mother, Alice, and innocent play with cousins. But a deadly epidemic and her mother’s false witchcraft conviction ended her childhood abruptly. She survived by leaning on her Aunt Rhody and forgetting the dark details that changed everything. However, as ugly rumors of another “witch” emerged in Windsor, Alissa could no longer hide from the past or herself. Through friendship and the support of her husband and later, her children, she confronts disturbing dreams and tragic events which unlock memories, reveal deeply-held secrets, and feed the growing uncertainty that she had played a part in her own mother’s death. The historical novel, Between Good & Evil seeks to understand the trauma of Alice Young’s daughter, Alice Young Beamon (Alissa), as she suffered in the aftermath of her mother’s hanging for witchcraft. It explores the role of friendship and love in overcoming pain and keeping those we love alive in respectful memory.