BookView Review

Stone’s latest dark fantasy continues The Haunted Women series with a story as atmospheric as it is unsettling. For Fran Tarantino, New York City is meant to be a place of opportunity, but her path is quickly entangled in the threads of a family legacy she never sought. Under her family’s close supervision, strange encounters and elusive pieces of the past start to align, revealing the edges of a danger she is only beginning to understand.

Stone refuses to let Daedrian drift into cliché villainy. He does not haunt from afar; he insinuates himself into the closest bonds, unraveling them piece by piece with methodical, intimate cruelty. The horror comes not just from what he does, but from how human his flaws are. The pacing is deliberate. Conversations carry tension in their pauses as much as in their words, and the supernatural bleeds into the everyday. Rather than relying on shock, Stone builds inevitability—by the time Fran begins to understand the depth of her danger, the reader has already absorbed the pattern of centuries. More than a ghost story, the novel is about the legacies we inherit—wealth, rules, curses—and how they shape who we become. Stone leaves enough unanswered to draw the series forward, but delivers a complete, emotionally charged chapter in Fran’s journey. The result is intoxicating and deeply unsettling, a story that stays with you long after the last page.

***