A novel featuring Lestat, the vampire hero, who makes a Faustian pact with Memnoch, the fallen angel and devil. 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.

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...

The fifth volume in the Vampire Lestat chronicles (The Tale of the Body Thief, etc.) finds Lestat pitted against the greatest adversaries of his bloody life: God and the Devil. Rice's richly descriptive latest - the best plotted of the series - is less horror novel than a knockoff of Dostoevsky's theological battles. Lestat is obsessed by Roger Flynn, a handsome billionaire cocaine smuggler whom he stalks for months and at last kills and dismembers. Then surprise: Roger's ghost turns up drinking Southern Comfort on a Manhattan barstool beside Lestat. All Roger wants is for Lestat to deliver some laundered cash and a trove of religious relics to his daughter, Dora, a New Orleans televangelist. The relics include a fake Veronica's Veil, perhaps 400 years old. Lestat flies Dora by batpower to Manhattan, shows her the apartment full of Roger's fabulous relics and cash. But Lestat hears the Hound of Heaven chasing him, which is also Memnoch the Devil (Satan), who takes Lestat to Limbo, engages him in cosmic chat about evil, and tries to get him to join him as co-ruler in Hell. Memnoch, a fantastic altruist, fights God for the betterment of mankind, especially for souls in Hell who someday deserve to go upstairs to Heaven. Then, after a huge chat with God, who tries to sign Lestat up for His team, the immortal vampire joins Jesus on the way to Calvary, is given the true Veronica's Veil after Christ imprints his bloody face on it, and has a horrific tour of Hell, full of souls trying to wash away their sins. Will Lestat choose Heaven or Hell? And will he get the real Veronica's Veil back to Dora? Not Christ and the Grand Inquisitor, but a vastly daring change of pace for the atheist Lestat, a tormented Ivan Karamazov tied into spiritual knots and left disbelieving his own senses. (Kirkus Reviews)