Author Madeline Martin visits Fernandina Beach's Story & Song Bookstore Bistro to promote her novel The Booklover's Library. | Mark Kaufman
Published on October 21, 2026 at 3:56 pm
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Readers might not know it from her romance novels set in Scotland or her historical fiction set against the backdrop of the London Blitz. But bestselling author Madeline Martin is also someone who you may run into walking down St. George Street in St. Augustine.
The St. Augustine resident is nearing the end of a months-long book tour that has taken her from Florida to the U.K. to promote her latest novel, A Time of Witches.
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Martin says the book has it all if you’re looking for your next fall read: black cats, witches and a little bit of magic.
Here’s Martin’s pitch: A Time of Witches follows “two women, 400 years apart, one who’s trying to survive the witch trials in England in 1645, one who has been having a recurring dream of being burned alive at the stake that leads her to an abandoned manor in England, where she has to save her ancestor from that fate or all will be lost.”
A Time of Witches is Martin’s 43rd novel. Before she was a prolific writer, though, Martin was a Flagler College student studying business.
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After graduation, Martin spent some time in Jacksonville as a business analyst.
It wasn’t until she was on maternity leave with her first daughter, Martin says, reading through Diana Gabaldon’s novel Outlander, that she decided to try her hand at her own romance set in a far-flung historical setting.
“I sucked,” she says, laughing. “I’m very type-A perfectionist, and I spent the next five years learning everything that I could about writing.”
Only after devouring books on writing and drinking in all the knowledge she could at workshops, she wrote her debut novel, Deception of a Highlander.
That led to a book deal and a desire to keep going. Despite working a full-time job, Martin says she was writing between six and eight books per year.
So when she was laid off from her corporate job, it wasn’t necessarily a tragedy.
“I was really happy because I was so tired,” Martin says.
Her body of work includes historical fiction and several romance series.
A spooky read with cats and witches
Now, after a number of her books have landed on bestseller lists, Martin says her latest revisits an idea she had as a teenager.
“I used to have this recurring dream that I was being burned alive at the stake,” Martin says. “So for me, being a very overly dramatic teenager with an overactive imagination, my knee-jerk reaction was thinking maybe this happened to me in a past life, or maybe this was an ancestor of mine and it’s some kind of generational trauma.”
She hesitated to write the book for years after hearing that “witches don’t really sell,” but now felt like the right time.
A Time of Witches draws inspiration from another real-world aspect of Martin’s life: her two black cats.
“I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to have a platform to really kind of amplify things that I feel passionate about,” Martin says, “and so I have a little note in the back about, ‘Yes, it’s a little bit cliché that I have a black cat in a witch book, but I really do it because I want to advocate for black cats because they are often the last ones adopted in shelters.’”
But don’t worry too much about the cat in A Time of Witches.
“None of the animals in my book get hurt or killed,” Martin says. “It’s like a little spoiler, but it’s one of those things where like I’m such a bleeding heart, and I feel like in witch books, familiars [witch’s best friends, often taking the form of an animal like a cat] always get tortured or killed.”
London, Scotland and… St. Augustine?
When approaching her historical fiction, Martin says the research is half the fun.
“For every historical fiction that I write, I usually use about 100-plus nonfiction books for research. I also travel on site to every single location I write about,” she explains. “When I go on site, it takes this black-and-white idea in my head and it paints it with these broad and vivid strokes that are just bold colors that make me really experience everything so that I can write about it in the book.”
Things like, “What does the air feel like? What does it smell like when I go closer to the river?” Martin says. “Are there certain town traditions that they always do? These are the kinds of things I’m really delving into.”
She travels a lot, but would she ever set a novel in Florida?
“I never say never,” Martin laughs.
In between tours around Europe, Martin says once a year, she and her husband like to do a staycation in St. Augustine. It’s an opportunity to enjoy the city as someone who isn’t a local might.
“We’ll stay in a bed-and-breakfast for a weekend, we’ll wear the trolley stickers,” Martin says. “We’ll do all the touristy things because we never had a chance to do it.”
Meet the author
Martin is spending some time in the coming weeks touring her new novel around locally, too.
She’ll be participating in a trolley tour around Amelia Island — along with speaking and signing books — as part of the Amelia Island Book Festival on Friday, Oct. 30. The next day, Halloween, Martin will be signing books from 1 p.m.-4 p.m. at Midnight Moon Books and Boutique in St. Augustine.
Finally, before heading toward South Florida, Martin will participate in an author talk from 2 p.m.-4 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 1, at Happy Medium Books Cafe in Jacksonville’s Riverside neighborhood.
