North Hampton is a small town on the far tip of Long Island that outsiders have trouble finding. The three Beauchamp women have lived there quietly for years: Joanna, the mother, who can heal the sick and has more than once brought back the dead; Ingrid, the elder daughter, an architectural historian at the local library who tells fortunes and ties spells into knotted thread; and Freya, the younger, who tends bar at the North Inn and mixes drinks that solve people's problems rather too well. They are immortal witches, and since the Salem trials they have been under a standing prohibition against using magic at all.
The prohibition holds until it does not. Freya becomes engaged to Bran Gardiner, the reserved heir to the Fair Haven estate, and meets his brother Killian on the same night. One by one the Beauchamps start practising again, discreetly at first and then not: a fertility charm here, a love potion there, a fortune told for a fee. Their neighbours are delighted. Then the harbour turns silver, the birds begin dying, people fall ill with something no doctor recognises, and a young woman disappears after an evening at Freya's bar.
Melissa de la Cruz's first novel written for adults reads as a small-town mystery with a family at its centre, told in turn from each of the three women's points of view. The magic is domestic and specific rather than grand, and the mythology underneath it is Norse: the family's real history reaches back a great deal further than Salem, and the answer to what is poisoning North Hampton comes from that older story. It opens The Beauchamp Family trilogy, continued in Serpent's Kiss and Winds of Salem, and shares a world with the author's Blue Bloods novels. Lifetime adapted it as a television series in 2013.