I enjoyed C.J. Cooke’s last book so I was interested to read this new one, The Last Witch. This book is rooted in the grim annals of 15th-century Innsbruck and doesn’t just evoke the time and fear of the witch hunts but it resurrects it with the cold precision of a trial transcript. This is a fictionalised version of the real story of Helena Scheuberin, a sharp-tongued burgher’s wife whose refusal to simper quietly seals her fate in a world where women’s words are weapons turned against them.
It’s 1485, and Helena discovers that her best friend and her best friend’s daughter have been killed as witches, this leads her to run afoul of Father Heinrich Kramer, the Dominican friar whose Malleus Maleficarum will soon become the playbook and excuse for Europe’s witchfinders.
When her lover, a footman in her husband’s employ drops dead, foam-flecked and convulsing, she’s not just suspected of poison but also branded a witch, her outspokenness twisted into evidence of demonic pacts. Cooke, drawing on the real Helena’s defiant stand against Kramer (a confrontation that only hardened his misogynistic zeal), tells a story less about spells and more about how men weaponise fear to silence those who might speak against them.
Cooke doesn’t shy from the brutality: of the time with each confession costing. Yet for all its darkness, this is a novel of fierce reclamation, where Helena’s voice—raw, unbowed—becomes the spell that outlives the flames.
I enjoyed it, but I think I preferred her last book, The Book of Witching but just because I enjoyed the way it placed with the different time periods, whereas this was all set in a similar time period. It is however a book that tells a great story and whilst is a fictionalised version of true events it showcases obsession and misogyny that is undoubtedly part of the real story, and this weaves a strong story around what we do know. Cooke, I find a heavy read because she is keen to preserve details of the facts but she is worth the effort and writes great feminist fiction that feels both modern and traditional, if this sounds like your kind of thing definitely give this a chance!