THE WITCHING HOUR

First behemoth installment (800+ pp.) in a new occult romance by Rice—now moving back into the bougainvillea and the New Orleans Garden District for her steamy new world of southern witchcraft. It's a couple of hundred pages (or more) before Rice hooks the reader and gets her major characters together; the story circles about the Mayfair family (bulking out the book are a few dozen family vignettes) and the generations of Mayfair witches who have accumulated one of the world's great fortunes while awaiting "the thirteenth"—the thirteenth witch in their succession, who will be the doorway by which a supernormal entity enters the human world and takes flesh. Dr. Rowan Mayfair—a San Francisco brain surgeon gifted with second sight, the power to heal (she foretells which cases will live before she lifts her knife), and the power to kill with her mind—was taken at birth from her Mayfair witch mother and raised by an aunt in San Francisco, and never knows until her mother dies that she is to inherit $7.5 billion. Meanwhile, alone and stormbound in her yacht, Rowan rescues a floating body from the sea, a wealthy local architect dead for an hour and being instructed by Mayfair figures in the beyond, and brings him back to life. Michael Curry now finds himself "cursed" with the power of psychometry (extrasensory fingertips) and has to wear gloves to stop the inflow of images. These two are being watched by—and then taken into the confidence of—Aaron Lightnet, a member of the Talamasca, a secret organization that for six centuries has investigated the paranormal. He warns Rowan and Michael against the Mayfair witches. An entity that has yet to achieve flesh has been passing itself through the eldest Mayfair women since the first Mayfair witch was burned at the stake in Holland. Now Rowan is pregnant by Michael, and the entity wants to become her fetus and flesh at last. The entity is by far the liveliest invention in the novel and the reader is left cliffhanging as this rather benign energy-being—fully (and erotically) empowered—is seen running off to Switzerland with Rowan. A writing mishmash, but a strong story stamps itself onto the brain.