Rowan Mayfair is a brilliant San Francisco neurosurgeon with uncanny abilities she barely understands, descended from a dynasty of New Orleans witches cursed to serve a supernatural entity named Lasher since the 17th century. When she revives a drowned man named Michael Curry on the California coast, two destinies collide — his gift of psychic touch, her inheritance of dark power, and both pulled toward the house on First and Chestnut Street in New Orleans where the family's secrets are buried. The Witching Hour spans generations across Europe and America, unearthing the Mayfair history in exquisite, obsessive detail.

Rowan Mayfair begins the series as a woman of fierce intellect and controlled precision, more comfortable saving lives in an OR than navigating the sprawling, chaotic family she never knew. Her journey from isolated outsider to the most powerful Mayfair witch in generations is a slow unraveling — of her certainties, her boundaries, and finally her heart — that Anne Rice renders with terrifying clarity.

The trilogy moves from gothic family saga into something stranger and more dangerous: Lasher, whom the first Mayfair witch conjured in 17th-century Scotland, is not merely a spirit but an ancient race made flesh, and his emergence reshapes the entire Mayfair legacy. Anne Rice weaves together centuries of history, corruption, and love across three enormous novels, building toward a conclusion that reveals the full tragic scope of what the Mayfairs traded for their power. Themes of family obligation, the seduction of dark knowledge, and what it means to love something that cannot be truly known run through every volume.