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..." -from The 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 seductive Queen of the Damned("mesmerizing" -SF Chronicle), a long-awaited novel that picks up where The Vampire Lestat ("brilliant...its undead characters are utterly alive" -New York Times) left off more than a quarter of a century ago to...