Imagine If Twin Peaks was a city! Dunedin is an atmospheric cloudy place and a perfect setting for the first act of WITCHES’ LADDER.

The life of Dunedin revolves around its university. University Of Otago is the oldest university of New Zealand and its students are about 20% of its close to 130 thousand people population.

It’s a vibrant quirky place with many coffee shops and restaurants, and an old fashioned movie theatre that seemed to step out of a gothic novel. Starting as a Scottish settlement in 1848 Dunedin is now the second larges city of the South Island of New Zealand. It has cold winters, rainy summers, and would serve as a perfect background for any Scandinavian murder mystery TV series.

I have spent only a week in Dunedin, but it was enough to fall in love with. The WITCHES’ LADDER mostly takes place during summer, but I would love, one day, to write about winter months. During winter Dunedin will not be unlike my home place – St. Petersburg. These two cities have one thing in common – they are both magical!

This is my very first post of my new website and I would like to talk about a certain artefact that became the key element of my latest novel – WITCHES’ LADDER!

Witches’ Ladder is practised in folk tales and witchcraft and was first discovered in England in 1848! It consists of a single knotted cord, where knots symbolise a spell. (sometimes feathers or a person’s hair are stuck in the knots as you see in this pic!)

Apparently a witch or witches could cast a death spell over a person by tying the knots and then hiding the cord, and the only way to undo the spell was to find the secreted cord and untie each knot.

In my novel WITCHES’ LADDER I took some liberties with the concept, but the main purpose of the ladder stayed the same. The serial killer in the book is hunting down the owners of the pieces of the WITCHES’ LADDER to find a salvation from a deadly disease. Is he just a lunatic or the curse is real?

Find out in my book right here!