The Witch Haven Books in Order

The Witch Haven is a two-book historical fantasy series about Frances Hallowell, a seventeen-year-old seamstress in 1911 New York City. Frances is grieving her brother's unexplained death and trying to get by in a world that offers working-class young women very little room to choose their own futures. Then a violent encounter reveals that she has magic, and her life is abruptly redirected.

Instead of being sent to prison, Frances is taken to Haxahaven, a school for witches disguised as a sanitarium. Inside its walls, she finds lessons, rules, and other girls who understand the strange things she can do. She also finds friendship with Maxine and Lena, who become an important part of the story's emotional center.

But Haxahaven is safety with strings attached.

Frances does not want to settle for the small, carefully controlled magic the school teaches. She wants to know what happened to her brother, understand the full reach of her power, and make decisions for herself. Those wishes put her in conflict with the adults who run Haxahaven, as well as with outside forces that see witches as useful tools or dangerous threats.

The first book, The Witch Haven, mixes a murder mystery with secret societies, dream encounters, and the restless energy of early twentieth-century Manhattan. Frances is brave, angry, and often impulsive. The series lets her make mistakes, then asks what she will do when the cost of those mistakes becomes clear. Romance is part of the picture, but the friendships among the young witches matter just as much.

In The Witch Hunt, the action moves to Paris. Frances, Maxine, and Lena leave the familiar grounds of Haxahaven to investigate magic that has begun behaving in alarming ways. The city opens the series up, taking them through secret gatherings, the Louvre, and the catacombs while old loyalties and unresolved feelings become harder to ignore.

Across both books, the mood is darkly magical and fast-moving, with danger around every corner but plenty of heart between the characters. The series is especially interested in power: who gets to use it, who gets told to hide it, and whether protection can become another form of control. Readers should start with The Witch Haven and continue directly to The Witch Hunt, which brings Frances's central story to a close.