The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (2009)

A Harvard graduate student's research in 1991 Massachusetts opens a trail towards the witch-trial past. Howe uses the hunt for a missing book to connect archives, domestic knowledge and the lives obscured by official accounts. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane imagines genuine inherited magic; that is the novel's departure from evidence about people accused of witchcraft. Choose it for a historical mystery in which deciphering sources is part of the action.