Some Towns Keep Their Secrets Buried. This One Kills to Protect Them.

Summer, 1991. When Claire Conrad, a water analyst for the Charleston Sanitary Board, is sent to the backwoods town of Palestine, West Virginia, she expects nothing more than contaminated drinking water. But what she finds is something far darker, older, and more dangerous than any chemical pollutant.

A mysterious illness is spreading through the town, but the people of Palestine don’t want help. Especially not from an outsider. Mary Ellen Bishop, the town’s iron-fisted matriarch and wife of a snake-handling preacher, claims the sickness is God’s will, a punishment for hidden sins. And Claire’s science-based interference? Blasphemy.

At first, it’s hostile glares, locked doors, and strange whispers. Then come the threats, the sabotage, the accidents that aren’t accidents at all. As Claire pushes deeper into the mystery, she realizes the sickness isn’t the only thing poisoning this town. Something else is at work here—something that doesn’t want her to leave alive.

Trapped in a town that sees her as the enemy, hunted by zealots willing to kill to keep their secrets, Claire has only her wits, her knowledge of chemistry, and a desperate will to survive. Because in Palestine, God may forgive… but the Devil Woman does not.

A gripping folk horror thriller blending religious paranoia, small-town secrecy, and heart-pounding survival, Devil Woman is perfect for fans of Paul Tremblay, Ania Ahlborn, and unsettling stories where science and superstition collide—with deadly consequences.

She came looking for poisoned water. What she found was far more terrifying.