Having created fantastic universes of vampires and witches, Anne Rice now carries us into the realms of the occult, the mystical and the magical, and into the presence - now and through centuries - of a dark and luminous new hero: the powerful, witty, smiling Azriel, Servant of the Bones.Azriel is ghost, demon, angel - in love with the good, in thrall to the evil - and he pours out his heart to us, telling us his astonishing story. He takes us back in time to his own mortal youth in the magnificent city of Babylon. In a time of bloody wars and religious upheavals, he 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, Azriel embarks on his perilous journey through time - from Babylon's hanging gardens, to Europe during the black Death, to Manhattan in the 1990s - and ultimately to his crucial confrontation with the twentieth-century embodiment of all that he has struggled against.
As Azriel's quest approaches its climax, 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.
