When the Raven swallows the moon, darkness descends and sometimes people die....

That's what Catherine Carmichael was told as a child growing up at Ravenswood, the forbidding mansion built by her grandfather on a remote peninsula in upstate New York. Now, twenty years after her father's sudden disappearance and her mother's spiriting young Catherine away to safety, she returns to the shadowy old manor for the reading of her eccentric uncle's will. There, amid ghostly servants and disturbing houseguests, she must confront a legacy of evil -- and an urbane, dark-haired stranger who sparks in her the passion she needs to unlock her family's secrets and banish forever the darkness from Ravenswood...and her own heart.