A haunting, richly-textured supernatural thriller about violence as inheritance and the line between control and love
The safest weapon in Joseph Stone’s The Haunted Women trilogy is literacy. For more than two centuries, the ghost of Daedrian Crow has haunted the women in Fran Tarantino’s bloodline, claiming them as his own. He watches them, sleeps beside them, and kills anyone he believes poses a threat. Spoken language is dangerous because Daedrian can hear nearly everything that happens in his presence, but he can’t read; writing is the one place the women can communicate beyond his reach.
Daedrian’s inability to read has shaped the trilogy from the beginning, turning letters, journals, and notes into the women’s primary form of protection. That ephemera preserves what earlier generations learned about him, creating a guide that may be Fran’s best chance to break the cycle for good. By A Black Magic, eighteen-year-old Fran Tarantino and her cousin Mary Jane Rizzo can sit right next to Daedrian while plotting against him, as long as their plans remain confined to a notebook passed between them.
Fran knows what Daedrian still doesn’t understand: he’s dead and not meant to still be here.
Daedrian Crow was a married Boston merchant; Fran’s ancestor, Violet Ralston, was his mistress. After strangling and threatening Violet while she was pregnant with his child, she poisoned him, meaning to bind Daedrian to his house when she killed him. But something went wrong, and the failed ritual leaves his ghost free to follow Violet’s descendants while Daedrian interprets his continued existence as divine intervention.
Violet’s poison worked fine. Her binding spell failed. Fran and Mary Jane must now find and fix what she got wrong.
Fran already has one way into the past, but it’s risky, and she must make the trip alone. A drop of her blood on an ancestor’s belonging gives her first-person access to that woman’s memory. For Mary Jane, though, these “blood visions” mean sitting helpless beside Fran’s body and watching the clock. The first lasted only seconds. Fran and Mary Jane are freshmen at Barnard, where the library gives them one of their safest places to investigate.
It’s here that Fran stays lost in a blood vision for ten minutes after touching an ancestor’s letter. Mary Jane knows where Fran has gone; what she doesn’t know is why she isn’t returning. She can’t tell what Fran is seeing or whether Daedrian has found some way into the vision with her. By the time an exhausted Fran finally opens her eyes, Mary Jane fears she’s lost her cousin to the vision.
Fran wants to try again almost immediately. But after an agonizing ten minutes thinking her cousin might be dead, Mary Jane starts insisting on precautions before every attempt. Fran keeps pushing for another vision. Mary Jane is trying to keep her alive.
The supernatural shapes the atmosphere of this expansive finale, but Stone doesn’t waste time re-establishing that ghosts are real. Fran, Mary Jane, and the women in the historical timelines already live with them. As the novel moves through blood visions and earlier generations, the questions become which spirits can be trusted, what their warnings mean, and what the living are willing to believe. That lets the Máirín’s 1714 chapters begin with the supernatural already woven into her life rather than stopping to explain it.
Those historical chapters also have enough ordinary pressure to keep them from feeling like fluffed-up lore delivery. Máirín has work, a marriage, family history, and a precarious place in her community long before the larger curse comes into focus. That makes the past feel lived in and gives the book’s supernatural history real weight when Fran begins reaching back into it.
The 1974 chapters keep ordinary life running alongside the haunting. College life carries on. The women have textbooks to buy, French class to survive, professors to impress, and a fussy great-aunt who insists their chauffeur walk them to campus. One afternoon they can be trying to translate a two-hundred-year-old curse; the next, they’re just trying to get through a French class without embarrassing themselves. That contrast keeps Fran and Mary Jane recognizably eighteen. The curse hasn’t made them solemn little gothic machines, and that makes the characters feel like people we can invest in.
Mary Jane benefits most from that grounding. She can’t see Daedrian or enter Fran’s blood visions, so her role is practical: she takes notes, manages risk, tracks Fran’s condition, and argues over when another attempt is worth the danger. She’s a partner, not an assistant, and the limits on what she can do make the waiting scenes more frightening.
Their notebook exchanges are the book’s best dialogue. The device strips away unnecessary conversational filler. Fran presses. Mary Jane objects. Fran tries to get around the objection. Their personalities develop through disagreement rather than exposition.
By this third book, Daedrian doesn’t need to threaten Fran to make a scene frightening. He climbs into bed to comfort her or worries when she claims she’s sick, while Fran calculates how much affection she needs to return without arousing his suspicion. He doesn’t act loving to disguise what he is. He thinks control is love.
The supporting cast borders on Tolstoyesque in size. Stone continues to give the sprawling family around Fran and Mary Jane lives of their own. Even the girls’ chauffeur and reluctant chaperone gets enough personality that his presence feels like part of their daily life rather than a convenient plot device. Stone excels in character.
In New York and Connecticut, Fran’s great-aunts fuss over the girls, enforce arbitrary rules, and still grieve Aurora, whose death the family believes was an accidental fall in Book One. Meanwhile, back in Buffalo, the Rizzos are still living with the damage inside their own family. Mary Jane’s younger brother, Richie, is trying to survive Catholic school, therapy, and his father’s suspicions about his sexuality.
Richie has one of the book’s sharpest voices. When his mother insists that his father strikes him because he loves him, Richie asks, “How do you suppose I might get him to love me less?” His scenes with his therapist have the same bite: Richie comes prepared to defend himself and often finds the adults around him responding in ways he didn’t rehearse for. Stone is incredibly skilled at letting those exchanges expose the family without stopping to explain everyone’s position afterward.
A Black Magic spends substantial time in Buffalo, sometimes leaving the occult investigation untouched long enough to lose urgency. The same thing happens on a smaller scale after some blood visions: Fran records what she experienced, Mary Jane reads it, and their discussion repeats information the scene has already made clear.
Stone’s scene-building is effective without ever trying too hard, like when we’re given only one or two physical details to place the scene. An office smells of old paper and lemon polish. Buffalo snowbanks blacken at the curb. In Richie’s therapist’s office, “the radiator ticked through their silences like a second clock.” Those details place the supernatural story in houses, classrooms, offices, and streets that feel occupied. They also keep the book from floating off into generic gothic atmosphere.
Much of the pleasure comes from watching Fran and Mary Jane approach the supernatural as a problem that can be studied, tested, and eventually solved. A Black Magic assumes that investment. This is a deeply satisfying finale for readers who know these families, their secrets, and exactly how much Daedrian has cost them.
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