Anne Rice, on top form, returns to the mesmerizing storytelling that has captivated readers for more than three decades in a dark gothic novel of suspense about assassins and angels, set in worlds past - the first in a new series called The Songs of the Seraphim. At the centre: Toby O'Dare - Lucky the Fox - a contract killer of underground fame. A soulless soul, a dead man walking...He's fallen far from grace, and lives under a series of aliases. Lucky takes his orders from someone he calls 'The Right Man', someone whose name and allegiances he doesn't know.When the novel opens, the time is the present. The place is Riverside, California, the Mission Inn. For O'Dare, it is his place of solace; he can be there without disguise. This time, he's been sent on an assignment to kill. Into his nightmarish world of lone and lethal missions, comes a mysterious stranger, a seraph, who offers him a chance to save lives, rather than destroy them. Lucky, who grew up in a New Orleans, son of an alcoholic mother and a murdered father, long ago dreamt of being a priest, craving rituals, taking refuge in history, books and lute music - but instead came to embody danger and violence - now seizes his chance.He is lifted in (angel) time and carried back through the ages to thirteenth-century England, to a dangerous world, where Jews live an uneasy existence, their money coveted and protected by the crown for their function as money-lenders, unjustly despised by the rest. Into this primitive, treacherous setting, where accusations of ritual murder have been made against innocent Jews, and children have been found dead or missing, O'Dare begins a journey of salvation that leads him from the medieval villages of England to the cities of London and Paris as his quest becomes a story of danger and flight, loyalty and betrayal, selflessness and love.