Lestat is back, saviour and demon, presiding over a gothic story of family greed and hatred through generations, a terrifying drama of blood lust and betrayal, possession and matricide. Blackwood Farm with its grand Southern mansion, set among dark cypress swamps in Louisiana, harbours blood-stained secrets and family ghosts. Heir to them all is Quinn Blackwood, young, rash and beautiful, himself a tyro bloodhunter whom Lestat takes under his wing.

But Quinn is in thrall not only to the past and his own appetities but, even more dangerously, to a companion spirit, a 'goblin' succubus who could destroy him and others. Only the unearthy power of Lestat combined with the earthly powers of the ubiquitous Mayfair clan could hope to save Quinn from himself and his ghosts, or to rescue the doomed girl whom Quinn loves from her own mortality. Shocking, savage and richly erotic, this novel with its deceptively gentle title brings us Anne Rice at her most powerfully disturbing.

Here are vampires and witches, men and women, demons and doppelganger, caught up in a maelstrom of death and destruction, blood and fire, cruelty and fate.