WICCA

Second installment of Follett's non-independently intelligible trilogy (Temple of the Winds, 2000) about the capture of a midsize English town by a UFO. Now the inhabitants are isolated behind a strange rubbery force field, beyond which they can descry what appears to be a post-glacial steppe. Among the developments here: council leader Asquith Prescott's rule grows ever more totalitarian (bad news for good cop Mike Malone); Adrian Roscoe and his crazy cultists revive a 17th-century statute permitting the burning of witches (bad news for local herbalist Ellen Duncan); an attempt to break through the barrier both succeeds and fails (bad news for everyone); and young Vikki Taylor, having regrown a hand lost in a childhood accident, becomes pregnant by an alien (hmm). Readers sufficiently intrigued by volume one will probably hang in there for the promised windup.