The Witches

The book “Witches” is about a group of witches all over the world who hate children.  They kidnap them and trap them into paintings so they can never escape.  During that time the child grows old on the canvas just as he or she would have done in real life until they disappear from the painting.  Children smell disgusting to witches and they turn them into stone or animals or they just make them disappear.

A grandmother in Norway tells her grandson Luke about these witches so that he can recognise the dangers and avoids them.  She tells him that they have purple eyes, they wear wigs, which makes their scalps itchy, because they have no hair.  They have no toes so they wear square toed shoes; have long sharp claws instead of fingers and blue saliva.

When the grandmother falls ill, their holiday to Norway is postponed and they go instead to Bournemouth and stay at a luxurious hotel where the Grand High Witch and all the witches in England are having their annual meeting ironically disguised as a "Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children" convention.  Luke explores the hotel and ends up in the meeting room where the witches’ annual convention takes place.  While he hides from them, he finds out the Grand High Witch’s plan to destroy all the children in England by making them eat chocolate laced with a formula which after a specific time changes them into mice.  Unfortunately, Luke’s friend Bruno, also a guest at the hotel, was invited to come to the meeting room with the promise of 6 bars of chocolate.  The Grand High Witch uses Bruno to demonstrate to the witches that the formula works.  Bruno turns into a mouse and Luke is also discovered and is forced to drink the formula and also turns into a mouse.

Both Luke and Bruno find his grandmother and tell her everything they have found out and they steal a bottle of the witches' potion and pour it into the green pea soup in the kitchen reserved for the witches' dinner. The witches all turn into mice within minutes. The hotel staff panic and, without realising, end up killing all of England's witches.  Luke and his grandmother then make a plan to travel to the Grand High Witch's Norwegian headquarters (having stolen her notebook, they know all the details), use the potion to change all of Norway's witches into mice, release cats in the building to kill them, and then use the Grand High Witch's counterfeit money to fund a mission to repeat the process all over the world.