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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.
Source:
annerice.com
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