"IT doesn't take much to raise the dead. . . I entered a shop as Fran�oise Lavery, in a grey twinset and a string of fake pearls. Ten minutes later, I left as someone else." Zozie de l'Alba, to be precise: vaguely foreign, flamboyant, loves bright colours, would never be seen dead in sensible shoes. Zozie is not only a shape-shifter, she is also a witch:

as is Vianne Rocher, whom we first met when she was shaking up the village of Lansquenetsous-Tannes in Joanne Harris's previous novel Chocolat.

The intervening years have not been kind to Vianne, who has reincarnated herself as Yanne Charbonneau, and is running a shabby chocolate shop in Montmartre. She has given up her "magic", decided to try and simply "fit in" and is fading dismally into the background.

She is even considering a conventional marriage to a wealthy property developer (who, tellingly, doesn't much care for chocolate) to secure her family's future.

Yanne's daughter Annie, on the brink of adolescence, is developing witchy qualities of her own. Zozie is immediately drawn to her, and thus to her mother and younger sister, the mysteriously mute four-year-old Rosette, whose instinct for the supernatural is already kicking in. Where Vianne-Yanne used her insights and powers for good, however, Zozie has a completely different agenda. Her own mother told her: "Meddle ye not, " but she says herself, "I was born to be a meddler, " and meddle she does, with the worst of intentions.

A thoroughly modern witch, she deals not only in charms and cantrips but in stolen credit card numbers and fake identities and she does her research on the internet.

Zozie is a confidence trickster in every sense. She gives Annie the courage and tactics to fight back against the clique of bullies who are making her life a misery at school, but the price she has in mind for this service is extraordinarily high. Yanne, determined to cling to her "ordinary" life and suppress her natural talents, eventually recognises Zozie's malign, corrupting influence and must take action for the sake of her daughter - and herself. As Zozie notes, "Witches don't just quit."

Yanne-Vianne is our whitewitch heroine but Zozie, the antiheroine, the proponent of the black arts, is a compelling creation. She can change her face, be young or old, beautiful or ugly and she cannot be photographed. She is coldblooded and very, very hungry, though not for truffles or macaroons. Her allegiance lies with the Aztecs, their penchant for human sacrifice and insistence on the malice of the universe, their hexes of the Smoking Mirror and the Lady Blood Moon, the jaguar and the monkey, blood and death. Beware of plausible, beautiful strangers in spangled red heels; lollipop shoes do not preclude a heart of darkness.