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"Last night she had rubbed her nose in death. Death was an act of beauty as real as composing a sonnet." This remarkable first novel by Mary Murrey starts out as an exquisitely crafted and restrained portrait of a single woman, depressed, who works as a secretary and lives alone in a rundown bungalow in Florida. After learning about pagan beliefs in her women's circle, she performs some tentative rituals involving her menstrual blood. An aggressive male Doberman is attracted to her property by the odor. She enters into a strange relationship with the dog, and becomes increasingly obsessed with him and what he represents to her. Unlike some female horror writers who work in a literary/psychological vein, Murrey does not hold back from depicting grotesque and violent consequences. Ultimately, the story plunges so deeply into the mythology of women, animals, and evil, we don't know whether to read it as an account of madness or as a mystical journey into the underworld. (The title is a reference to the historical persecution of women accused of being witches.) The Inquisitor is a gripping and unusual horror novel.