Italy 1252. Inquisition. Accusation. Fear. Torture. The guilty and the innocent dying for sins real and imagined in the flames of the burning stake. Neilsville, 1978. Peter Blasam has come to this sleepy desert town to teach its youth, and finds a mystery of mounting horror. Something is happening to the young girls of St. Francis Xavier High School -- something evil. In bloodlet and terror a suicide contagion has swept the two... while a dark order of its holy men enacts a secret medieval ritual. Is hysteria manipulating these innocent children into violent self-destruction? Or has supernatural force, a thirteenth-century madness, returned to... Punish The Sinners.
John Saul's first novel Suffer the Little Children was an immediate million-copy bestseller. He has since written such bestsellers as Guardian, All Fall Down, Nathaniel, Brainchild, Hellfire, The Unwanted, The Unloved, Creature, Sleepwalk, Second Child, Darkness, Shadows, The Homing, Black Lightning and The Presence, each a spine-tingling tale of supernatural, technological, or psychological terror. John Saul divides his time between Seattle, Washington, and Maui, Hawaii. He is currently working on his next novel.