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Zusatztext “Thrilling. . . . [Readers] will feel divinely entertained.” — People “Veers delightfully into vintage Rice.” — Elle “Intriguing. . . . A richly enveloping atmosphere.” — The Times Picayune “Rice brings an energy and sincerity to her story.” — USA Today “A masterpiece that both invites and provokes.” — L.A. Examiner Informationen zum Autor ANNE RICE is the author of thirty-seven books. She died in 2021. Klappentext From the author of Interview with the Vampire! this national bestseller begins a divinely thrilling new series about an assassin with the choice to turn from darkness to light.It's the present day. Toby O'Dare-aka Lucky the Fox-is a contract killer on assignment once again. He's a soulless soul! a dead man walking. His nightmarish world of lone and lethal missions is disrupted when a mysterious stranger! a seraph! offers him a chance to save rather than destroy lives. O'Dare! who long ago dreamt of being a priest! seizes his chance. Now he is carried back through the ages to thirteenth-century England! to dark realms where children suddenly die or disappear! and accusations of ritual murder have been made against Jews. Here O'Dare begins his perilous quest for salvation! a journey of danger and flight! loyalty and betrayal! selflessness and love. Leseprobe SHADES OF DESPAIR There were omens from the beginning. First off, I didn't want to do a job at the Mission Inn. Anywhere in the country, I would have been willing, but not the Mission Inn. And in the bridal suite, that very room, my room. Bad luck and beyond, I thought to myself. Of course my boss, The Right Man, had no way of knowing when he gave me this assignment that the Mission Inn was where I went when I didn't want to be Lucky the Fox, when I didn't want to be his assassin. The Mission Inn was part of that very small world in which I wore no disguise. I was simply me when I went there, six foot four, short blond hair, gray eyes—a person who looked like so many other people that he didn't look like any special person at all. I didn't even bother to wear braces to disguise my voice when I went there. I didn't even bother with the de rigueur sunglasses that shielded my identity in every other place, except the apartment and neighborhood where I lived. I was just who I am when I went there, though who I am was nobody except the man who wore all those elaborate disguises when he did what he was told to do by The Right Man. So the Mission Inn was mine, cipher that I was, and so was the bridal suite, called the Amistad Suite, under the dome. And now I was being told to systematically pollute it. Not for anyone else but myself, of course. I would never have done anything to harm the Mission Inn. A giant confection and confabulation of a building in Riverside, California, it was where I often took refuge, an extravagant and engulfing place sprawling over two city blocks, and where I could pretend, for a day or two or three, that I wasn't wanted by the FBI, Interpol, or The Right Man, a place where I could lose myself and my conscience. Europe had long ago become unsafe for me, due to the increased security at every checkpoint, and the fact that the law enforcement agencies that dreamed of trapping me had decided I was behind every single unsolved murder they had on the books. If I wanted the atmosphere I'd loved so much in Siena or Assisi, or Vienna or Prague and all the other places I could no longer visit, I sought out the Mission Inn. It couldn't be all those places, no. Yet it gave me a unique haven and sent me back out into my sterile world a renewed spirit. It wasn't the only place where I wasn't anybody at all, but it was the best place, and the place to which I went the most. The Mission Inn was not far from where I "lived," if one ...
