Life seems great for Dr. Kate Pomeroy, surgical resident at Los Angeles’ Memorial Hospital, as she prepares to assist Dr. Alastair Redbone in removing an older man’s gall bladder. Then, as she picks up the scalpel, the room starts to shift and her consciousness begins to alter. She passes out and wakes up in the ER, strapped to a gurney and under the observation of a psychiatrist she has reason to distrust.

Thus begins her living nightmare, sending her from sunny Southern California to coastal Maine, where her family owns a huge mansion on Storm Island.

Her father, Hamilton, chief of staff at Memorial Hospital, doubts his daughter’s diagnosis, especially when she proves that the psychiatrist is dosing her with experimental drugs, and instead sends her to New York to be cared for by his sister Hephzibah, a psychiatrist, and her husband, Raoul. However, as soon as she arrives, her aunt and uncle inform her she’ll be heading out to Stormview, the family’s manor house on Storm Island, off the coast of Maine. Kate will stay in the carriage house while helping get the house ready for summer, as well as take medication prescribed by her aunt.

Almost as soon as she arrives on the island, however, she’s forced to face the memory of her mother’s suicide nineteen years earlier, including finding her body spinning from a ceiling fan. From her first day on the island, she hallucinates, endures horrifying nightmares, and glimpses a stone silo no one else can see. She also strikes up a romance with Jeremy, a local lobsterman who was a childhood friend.

Even after her father, aunt, and uncle arrive at Stormview, the bizarre interludes continue. Her father believes her, but her aunt and uncle dismiss her symptoms as signs that she’s as mentally disturbed as her late mother. When she finally meets the man her mother was supposedly having an affair with, a sculptor who’s also Jeremy’s uncle, he supplies her with the first sign she’s not insane — in fact, he has an interesting theory about her lineage that explains some of the mysteries she’s experiencing, although no one has any idea just how dangerous Stormview and Storm Island are for Kate Pomeroy.

Linda Watkins has written a spellbinding mystery that will keep readers turning pages well into the night and promises to be a bewitching series.