The Witching Hour
Trade cloth book club edition in good condition. Mylar cover included. Mayfair Witches #1.
“I feel the darkness near me; I feel the light shining. And more keenly I feel the contrast between the two.”
It begins in our time with a rescue at sea. Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant neurosurgeon—aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches—finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life. He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him.
As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and—in passionate alliance—set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift. The novel moves backward and forward in time from today’s New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the France of Louis XIV. An intricate tale of evil unfolds—an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first “witch,” Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjurs up the spirit she names Lasher…a creation that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn.
From the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, as Julien—the clan’s only male to be endowed with occult powers—provides for the dynasty its foothold in America. The dark luminous story encompasses dramas of seduction and death as well as episodes of tenderness and healing. Always—through peril and escape, tension and release—there swirl around us the echoes of eternal war: innocence versus the corruption of the spirit, sanity against madness, life against death. With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us to the present and Rowan’s increasingly inspired and risky moves in the merciless game that binds her to her heritage.
Trade cloth book club edition in good condition. Mylar cover included. Mayfair Witches #1.
“I feel the darkness near me; I feel the light shining. And more keenly I feel the contrast between the two.”
It begins in our time with a rescue at sea. Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant neurosurgeon—aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches—finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life. He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him.
As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and—in passionate alliance—set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift. The novel moves backward and forward in time from today’s New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the France of Louis XIV. An intricate tale of evil unfolds—an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first “witch,” Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjurs up the spirit she names Lasher…a creation that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn.
From the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, as Julien—the clan’s only male to be endowed with occult powers—provides for the dynasty its foothold in America. The dark luminous story encompasses dramas of seduction and death as well as episodes of tenderness and healing. Always—through peril and escape, tension and release—there swirl around us the echoes of eternal war: innocence versus the corruption of the spirit, sanity against madness, life against death. With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us to the present and Rowan’s increasingly inspired and risky moves in the merciless game that binds her to her heritage.
Trade cloth book club edition in good condition. Mylar cover included. Mayfair Witches #1.
“I feel the darkness near me; I feel the light shining. And more keenly I feel the contrast between the two.”
It begins in our time with a rescue at sea. Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant neurosurgeon—aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches—finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life. He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him.
As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and—in passionate alliance—set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift. The novel moves backward and forward in time from today’s New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the France of Louis XIV. An intricate tale of evil unfolds—an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first “witch,” Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjurs up the spirit she names Lasher…a creation that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn.
From the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, as Julien—the clan’s only male to be endowed with occult powers—provides for the dynasty its foothold in America. The dark luminous story encompasses dramas of seduction and death as well as episodes of tenderness and healing. Always—through peril and escape, tension and release—there swirl around us the echoes of eternal war: innocence versus the corruption of the spirit, sanity against madness, life against death. With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us to the present and Rowan’s increasingly inspired and risky moves in the merciless game that binds her to her heritage.
ISBN 0-394-58786-3
Anne Rice
1990