Carrier (Kathleen Kent) Books in Order

These books grow out of Kathleen Kent's own family history, and the clearest way to read them is The Wolves of Andover / The Traitor's Wife first, followed by The Heretic's Daughter. Together they trace Martha Carrier and her family before and during the years that lead into the Salem witch trials.

These are intimate family stories before they are public-history set pieces.

In The Wolves of Andover / The Traitor's Wife, the focus is on young Martha Allen and the mysterious Thomas Carrier in colonial Massachusetts. Martha is smart, stubborn, and not especially interested in becoming the sort of quiet woman her world prefers. Thomas is strong, capable, and carrying secrets from England that make the new life he wants much harder to hold onto. Frontier labor, Puritan rules, and old political violence all press against their courtship.

Then The Heretic's Daughter shifts the view to Sarah Carrier, Martha's daughter, as fear hardens into accusation. Kent spends real time on farm work, sickness, church pressure, neighborly grudges, and the daily grind of survival, which makes the coming panic feel even worse. The Salem story here is not just about the courtroom. It is about how a community teaches itself to turn on people it already finds difficult.

Martha is the force that ties the books together.

Across both novels, she is written as a woman whose independence can look like danger to the people around her. Thomas brings a quieter kind of steel, and Sarah gives the later book its emotional center. What links the series is not only shared history but the feeling of a family being pushed from all sides, by gossip, by belief, by state power, and by the simple fact that they do not bend easily.

The tone is immersive and serious, but not dry. There is romance in the early chapters, suspense in Thomas's past, and a heavy sense of dread as Salem closes in. If you want historical fiction that stays close to work, weather, marriage, children, and the cost of public fear, this series pulls you in slowly and then keeps tightening.