A stunning departure, a surprising and compelling return From Anne Rice, perennial best seller, single-handed reinventor of the vampire cosmology--a new, exhilarating novel, a deepening of her vampire mythology, and a chillingly hypnotic mystery-thriller. "What can we do but reach for the embrace that must nowcontain both heaven and hell: our doom again and again andagain " --fromThe Vampire Lestat Rice once again summons up the irresistible spirit-world of the oldest and most powerful forces of the night, invisible beings unleashed on an unsuspecting world able to take blood from humans, in a long-awaited return to the extraordinary world of the Vampire Chronicles and the uniquely seductiveQueen of the Damned("mesmerizing" --San Francisco Chronicle), a long-awaited novel that picks up whereThe Vampire Lestat("brilliant its undead characters are utterly alive" --New York Times) left off more than a quarter of a century ago to create an extraordinary new world of spirits and forces--the characters, legend, and lore of all the Vampire Chronicles. The novel opens with the vampire world in crisis vampires have been proliferating out of control; burnings have commenced all over the world, huge massacres similar to those carried out by Akasha inThe Queen of the Damned Old vampires, roused from slumber in the earth are doing the bidding of a Voice commanding that they indiscriminately burn vampire-mavericks in cities from Paris and Mumbai to Hong Kong, Kyoto, and San Francisco. As the novel moves from present-day New York and the West Coast to ancient Egypt, fourth century Carthage, 14th-century Rome, the Venice of the Renaissance, the worlds and beings of all the Vampire Chronicles-Louis de Pointe du Lac; the eternally young Armand, whose face is that of a Boticelli angel; Mekare and Maharet, Pandora and Flavius; David Talbot, vampire and ultimate fixer from the secret Talamasca; and Marius, the true Child of the Millennia; along with all the other new seductive, supernatural creatures-come together in this large, luxuriant, fiercely ambitious novel to ultimately rise up and seek out who-or what-the Voice is, and to discover the secret of what it desires and why And, at the book's center, the seemingly absent, curiously missing hero-wanderer, the dazzling, dangerous rebel-outlaw--the great hope of the Undead, the dazzling Prince Lestat "