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 LestatRice 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" -SF 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 . . .