"Sit back and enjoy. . .The story flows like blood" Recurrent memories of past tragedies conjure up a violin-playing ghost in Rice's tortured, surely semi-autobiographical tale of love and grief. Narrator Triana has long accused herself of complicity in the deaths of her alcoholic mother and cancer-ridden daughter, but when her husband dies, too, an angry ghost comes to compound her guilt. In life, a 19th-century Viennese aristocrat who studied the violin with Beethoven, Stefan Stefanovsky, torments Triana with her lack of talent, then transports her into his own past, where she witnesses his death and hears performances by Beethoven and Paganini.

Returning to the present, Triana makes a pilgrimage to Brazil where she believes her daughter may be reincarnated. Although Rice tends to group her novels into series, this ghost story bears little relationship to last year's Servant of the Bones. Its themes are darker, its ghost more seductive and its events clearly more personal. With so many parallels between the novel's details and what Rice has revealed of her own lifefrom her battles with weight to her Brazilian odysseyone almost wonders whether Rice has seen something like the apparition that her heroine describes. However much of the tale is pure invention, a new lyricismin keeping with the music that mocks and ultimately consoles her for her mortalitybrings Triana's strong, textured voice almost audibly to life. L

Don't look for vampires or witches in Rice's latest, though it is still haunted by malevolent spirits. A young woman who longs to become a great violinist is at first abetted and then dangerously controlled by the ghost of a Russian aristocrat. Kirkus Reviews Anne Rice in her short form, and yet dreadfully in need of a caustic edit. Wavering between dream and reality, Rice (Servant of the Bones, 1996, etc.) opens with vastly wealthy Triana Becker's heartbreak in New Orleans as her husband Karl dies of AIDS. She lies embracing Karl's corpse for two days, celebrates the love he and she had, and longs to follow him into the grave: "All the blood in our dark sweet grave is gone, gone, gone, save mine, and in our bower of earth I bleed as simply as I sigh. If blood is wanted now for any reason under God, I have enough for all of us." As the reader struggles for a footing in all this gush, Triana's mourning flows into a bitter argument with her sisters, Katrinka and Rosalind, as they ponder where their missing younger sister Faye has gone, noting that a vagabond violinist who has been pursuing Triana has also vanished. Triana has seen a lot of death: her father, her drunkard mother, and the young daughter she and her first husband, Lev, lost to cancer. When Prince Stefan Stefanovsky, the violinist in question and now a ghost, returns with his fiddle, she parries his advances in surprisingly wooden dialogue . She steals his Stradivarius and, vamping its phantom strings, is able to transport herself and Stefan back to Vienna and Beethoven, then to Venice and Paganini, and, in increasingly surreal sequences, to Rio de Janeiro and to triumphs as an untutored virtuoso, e...