Emerson Baker has written an engaging and highly detailed account of a little known witchcraft episode in New Hampshire in 1682, a full decade before the notorious Salem, Massachusetts, outbreak. The New Hampshire episode was characterised by a mysterious hail of stones outside and within the Walton tavern in Portsmouth, and, later, at other locales – hence the name by which the attack was known: ‘lithobolia’ or the ‘stone-throwing devil’. The book follows a traditional chronological narrative, with lively writing and well-drawn characters, but it does not hide its scholarly apparatus. Baker takes issue with or draws support from much of the mountain of historical and contemporary writing on witchcraft. While this does interrupt the narrative, it makes it a good teaching book – an engaging read, but one that leaves a clear historiographical trail. One of the greatest strengths of the book is Baker's meticulous research into local records, which allows him to trace the community interactions that may have prompted hostile behaviour and the communication networks that allowed news of the outbreak to spread to other locales and perhaps spawn copycat incidents. These details demonstrate Baker's unparalleled knowledge of seventeenth-century Maine and New Hampshire. They also provide the foundation for his argument that local political, economic and religious disputes prompted the attacks contemporaries described as witchcraft. Baker asserts, with unflinching certainty, that the stone-throwing that plagued the Walton Tavern was consciously carried out by hostile neighbours and relatives. Unfortunately, the author cannot provide any evidence other than motive for this assertion. There were multiple witnesses to the lithobolia attacks, which Baker concedes would have required the involvement of many strong people, but no one saw anyone hurl a single rock. And no one ever confessed, either then or in later fits of remorse, to having participated. Without substantiating evidence, Baker's rational explanation is no more valid than the supernatural one contemporaries gave for the event – an attack by witches in the thrall of the devil. This reviewer would have preferred a more tentative approach to the cause of ‘witchcraft’ – a subject that continues to stir controversy. That said, The devil of Great Island is a well-written, remarkably detailed case study of a neglected incident in the field of early modern witchcraft.