Kendall Morgen is a young widow with a chronic illness, a mutinous teen-aged son, an Irish setter who needs a shrink, and a job as a nurse at St. Fillan's Psychiatric Hospital, where the staff is loonier than the patients. On October 1st, three years to the day she watched them lower him into a muddy grave, she wakes up wearing her dead husband's clothes, only to find Apothecary's roses the color of blood decorating her doorstep.

The "L" who signed the card hidden among the thorns could only be her first love, but that poetry-writing black-haired, blue-eyed young stalker was dead, wasn't he? He had disappeared from their town and her life 25 years ago. Is it a coincidence that the same day she finds a very much alive Liam Connelly admitted to the hospital, she also finds her boss's very dead body, the doctor's skull smashed like a pumpkin, bits of brain and bone scattered untidily around his office?

As the leaves fly, things in her peaceful Connecticut town turn from ordinary to extraordinary. Soon her son becomes best friends with a possible serial killer, and Kendall gets warnings from witches and cryptic messages from a Gypsy psychic, kidnapped by an inept posse of desperados, and bedded by a younger man.

On the full-mooned final night of the dying month, there is the Red Rose Masquerade to attend, and two masked men between which to choose, one who loves her, and one who wants her dead, while someone even more lethal waits and watches on St.Fillan's rooftop Widow's Walk, where it all started a century ago.

Kendall Morgen's story is only one piece of a mosaic as intricate as St. Fillan's stained glass windows. Dr. Machauley MacLaren, hopeful that the new methods of Freud would cure his mother Michaela's madness, founded the hospital, named for the patron saint of the insane, in 1898. The looming Victorian holds the key to starker, darker, secrets. This particular painted lady is an eerie place, where things go bump in the night and staff and patients alike have a propensity for a premature demise.

More of the mosaic, further revelations, await in "April Reign," the next in the Kendall Morgen series, as the old hospital lies in ruins, demolished in the name of progress. "Parallel to it the skeleton of the new St. Fillan's fleshed out more with each passing day. As the new building rose, the old one seemed to sink, huddling in its shadows, trying to hide its secrets, as if sharing the same soul…"

The multi-layered story concludes in the third book, "Junebury," as we fade back into the 19th century, and Michaela MacLaren finally speaks.