Trigger warnings for brief but recurring references to rape and interpersonal violence.
Piers Corbin has to run away. Her husband (who sets my skin a-crawling as soon as he appears on the page) will kill her one of these days. But Piers is patient. She is smart. And she has a secret weapon that only a small group of women know about. In The Bane Witch, by Ava Morgyn, we follow Piers as she fakes her death and flees hundreds of miles in search of sanctuary. Piers’s life, surprisingly, is about to get even more complicated than it usually is.
We meet Piers on the morning she finally sets her plan into motion. In order to escape her husband, Piers is going to fake her death and leave a few clues behind to make it look like her monstrous husband had something to do with her disappearance. Piers leaves nothing to chance. She swallows toxic pokeweed berries and jumps off of a very high bridge; she also has a life jacket on under her coat and is strong enough to swim to a nearby marina. It’s hard not to cheer for Piers as she makes her way from Charleston, South Carolina, to her aunt’s rural inn in upstate New York. It’s also hard not to cringe a bit when she makes mistakes along the way, mistakes that will later bite her in the ass. (Never, ever, take a ride from a man who’s too insistent.)
Aunt Myrtle is the kind of relative who will put you up for an indefinite period of time, asking no questions, while also putting you to work wherever she needs a pair of hands. She’s also the best place for an emotionally wounded woman like Piers to seek refuge—at least until Piers finally figures out the family secret. It’s no spoiler to say that there is something odd about the women in Piers’s family. All of them can eat plants that would kill most people. And all of them can use the poisons created by those plants on others. These women, bane witches, have kept their secret for centuries so that they can help shuffle off the mortal coils of very bad men. These women are utterly baffled by the fact that Piers (who was raised apart from the family) never used her penchant for pokeweed to kill her husband.
So, we’ve got Piers coping with her past, learning about her family, hoping that no one follows her from South Carolina—all of which is plenty to be getting on with—when Morgyn throws a serial killer into the mix. Honestly, there are at least two books in The Bane Witch by Ava Morgyn, possibly three. Both (or all) of these stories would’ve been great on their own and I’d be down for an entire series of individual books about our protagonist, Piers Corbin, and the lore of bane witches. As much as I enjoyed elements of this book, it was left feeling unsatisfied by the way Morgyn shoehorned so many plots together. Rather than enhancing each other and deepening the experience of the setting, the many plots diluted much of the book’s emotional impact. The Bane Witch was too overstuffed for me.