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.<br><br>"What can we do but reach for the embrace that must now<br>contain both heaven and hell: our doom again and again and<br>again…" --from <i>The Vampire Lestat</i><br><br>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 seductive <i>Queen of the Damned </i>("mesmerizing" --<i>San Francisco Chronicle</i>), a long-awaited novel that picks up where <i>The Vampire Lestat</i> ("brilliant…its undead characters are utterly alive" --<i>New York Times</i>) 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.<br><br>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 in <i>The Queen of the Damned</i>…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.<br><br>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…<br><br>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…<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>