A chilling mystery based on true events, from New York Times bestselling author Katherine Howe.

Its senior year, and St. Joans Academy is a pressure cooker. Grades, college applications, boys texts: Through it all, Colleen Rowley and her friends keep it together. Until the schools queen bee suddenly falls into uncontrollable tics in the middle of class.

The mystery illness spreads to the school’s popular clique, then more students and symptoms follow: seizures, hair loss, violent coughing fits. St. Joans buzzes with rumor; rumor erupts into full-blown panic.

Everyone scrambles to find something, or someone, to blame. Pollution? Stress? Are the girls faking? Only Colleenwhos been reading The Crucible for extra creditcomes to realize what nobody else has: Danvers was once Salem Village, where another group of girls suffered from a similarly bizarre epidemic three centuries ago . . .

Inspired by true eventsfrom seventeenth-century colonial life to the halls of a modern-day high schoolConversion casts a spell.

Katherine Howe is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and The House of Velvet and Glass. She is a lecturer in American Studies at Cornell University. She is also a direct descendant of three of the women accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch trials, one who was hanged and two who survived.