In a Massachusetts town, an evil wizard is about to come back from the dead and a young hero must fight to stop him . . .
In the days of the Salem witch trials, the sleepy hamlet of Duston Heights had just one practitioner of the dark arts: the notorious necromancer Esdrias Blackleach. As the fever for witch hunting reached its terrible peak, Blackleach was accused of using powerful black magic against his fellow townsfolk. But just before he could be brought to trial, he dropped dead, escaping justice forever. Or so it seemed . . .
Fast forward to the 1950s, the inquisitive young sleuth Johnny Dixon and his mentor Professor Childermass are getting ready to donate a box of Blackleach artifacts to the local museum when a descendant of the sorcerer shows up and attempts to steal his ancestor’s wooden hand. He has a fiendish plan to raise the old necromancer from the dead, and only Johnny and the professor can stop him and make the town safe from black magic forever.
The Johnny Dixon stories, from the award-winning author of The House with a Clock in Its Walls, have been acclaimed for their “believable and likable characters” (The New York Times) and “spine-tingling” supernatural adventure (Publishers Weekly).
By donating a box full of strange objects, Professor Childermass gets his young friend Johnny Dixon a summer job at the Gudge Museum. Everything seems okay as Johnny mops the floors and dusts the artifacts. That is, until a sinister man named Mattheus Mergal shows up looking for the one item the professor held back to keep safe--a wooden hand carved by the evil wizard Esdrias Blackleash. If Mergal gets the hand, he'll be able to bring back his long-dead relative and their sinister powers will be unstoppable. It's up to Johnny and the professor to keep Mergal from taking over the world, but they'll have to face nightmares, snakes, and imprisonment inside a tiny snow globe. Can they stop Mattheus Mergal in time? In this tenth book in the Johnny Dixon series, author Brad Strickland continues the fast-paced adventures and eerie atmosphere first created by master of chills John Bellairs.
