A new saga begins, a major departure for the incomparable
Anne Rice.
Having created fantastic universes of vampires and
witches, having chronicled the exploits of Lestat and the
Mayfairs, she carries us now into new realms of the
occult, the mystical, and the magical, and into the
presence--now and through the centuries--of a dark and
luminous new hero: the powerful, witty, smiling Azriel,
Servant of the Bones.
He is ghost, demon, angel--in love with the good, in
thrall to the evil. He pours out his heart to us, telling
us his astonishing story when he finds himself--in our own
time, in New York City--a dazed witness to the murder of a
young girl called Esther and inexplicably obsessed by the
desire to avenge her.
He takes us back to his mortal youth in the magnificent
city of Babylon--the gateway to the pagan gods, a wonder
of ziggurats, shrines, and ships at anchor from all
nations.
We see Azriel at twenty--a Jew, educated, rich, beautiful,
fiercely devoted to his captive Hebrew tribe, and
dedicated to his prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah. In this
time of bloody wars and religious upheavals, greedy kings
and cunning magicians who vie with rabbis for spiritual
domination, Azriel falls victim to a royal plot compounded
by his devotion to his Hebrew God--only to be plucked from
death by evil priests and sorceresses and transformed into
a genii commanded to do their bidding.
Challenging these forces of destruction, marshalling all
his strength and wit to defeat them, Azriel embarks on his
perilous journey through time--from Babylon's hanging
gardens to the Europe of the Black Death to Manhattan in
the 1990s--and ultimately to his crucial confrontation
with the ambitious and charismatic multibillionaire, the
televangelist-terrorist Gregory Belkin, father of the
mysteriously murdered Esther--and the twentieth-century
embodiment of all that Azriel has struggled against.
As Azriel's quest approaches its climactic horror, he
dares to use and to risk his supernatural powers in the
hope of forestalling a world-threatening conspiracy, and
redeeming, at last, what was denied him so long ago: his
own eternal human soul.
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