In this stunning, terrifying new novel from the phenomenally successful Anne Rice, Lestat, her vampire hero, makes a Faustian pact with Memnoch, the fallen angel and devil. When the novel opens, Lestat is being stalked through the squalor and opulence of New Orleans, sensing for the first time what it must be like to be one of his own victims. The dramatic plot hurtles through space and time from the New Orleans underworld in the 1990s to the first century AD, the Fourth Crusade, and an apocalyptic denouement in hell. Lestat brings back the shroud imprinted with the face of Christ, and is saved from damnation only by will of Dora, the saintly nun whose blood he desires but whom he could not bring himself to harm. Blind in one eye, and weak, he returns to earth and the present as a captive of his own kind and Dora's charge, uncertain whether he will ever be able to kill again. . . .