“I dreamed a dream of angels. I saw them and heard them in a great
and endless galactic night. I saw the lights that were these angels,
flying here and there, in streaks of irresistible brilliance... I
felt love around me in this vast and seamless realm of sound and light... And something akin to sadness swept me up and mingled my very
essence with the voices who sang, because the voices were singing of me...”
Thus begins Anne Rice’s lyrical, haunting new novel, a metaphysical thriller of angels and assassins that once again summons
up dark and dangerous worlds set in times past. Anne Rice takes us to
other realms, this time to the world of fifteenth-century Rome, a city
of domes and rooftop gardens, rising towers and crosses beneath an
ever-shifting layer of clouds; familiar hills and tall pines... of
Michelangelo and Raphael, of the Holy Inquisition and of Leo X, second
son of a Medici, holding forth from the papal throne...
And
into this time, into this century, Toby O’Dare, former government
assassin, is summoned by the angel Malchiah to solve a terrible crime of poisoning and to search out the truth of a haunting by an earthbound
restless spirit — a diabolical dybbuk.
O’Dare soon discovers
himself in the midst of dark plots and counterplots surrounded by a
darker and more dangerous threat as the veil of ecclesiastical terror
closes in around him.
As he embarks on a powerful journey of
atonement, O’Dare is reconnected with his own past, with matters light
and dark, fierce and tender, with the promise of salvation and with a
deeper and richer vision of love.
