Mansions of Darkness » (REV)

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's interests range from music—she composes and has studied seven different instruments as well as voice—to history, from horseback riding to needlepoint. Her writing is similarly wide-ranging; under her own name and pseudonyms, she has written everything from westerns to mysteries, from science fiction to nonfiction history.

Yarbro's critically-acclaimed historical horror novels featuring the Count Saint-Germain, including Hotel Transylvania, A Feast in Exile, Communion Blood, and Night Blooming, have a loyal readership. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has always lived in California and currently makes her home in the Berkeley area.

Ambitious in its scope and provocative in its content, the saga of Count Saint-Germain is a monumental feat of the imagination. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's powerful and evocative novels have captured Saint-Germain throughout his long existence, from the temples of ancient Eygpt to our present century.

Now the count's endless travels bring him to seventeenth-century Peru, where he finds solace for his loneliness in the arms of an Incan priestess. But mighty Spain has conquered the Incan people—and brought the dreaded attention of the Holy Inquisition to the New World.

Publishers Weekly

The long-suffering vampire Count Saint-Germain turns up in 16th-century Peru in this latest installment (after Darker Jewels) in a series that began with Hotel Transylvania in 1978. Although Saint-Germain hopes to live quietly in this land where a monolithic Church is systematically destroying the remnants of Inca culture, his eccentric interests immediately mark him as an outsider. The local clergy believe his medical knowledge is evidence of witchcraft; those rumors are inflamed when Saint-Germain befriends a woman said to be the last of a once-powerful family of Inca priests and nobles. Side plots present priests vying for supremacy in the Church hierarchy and fortune-hunting Spaniards seeking legendary Inca treasure. As usual with Yarbro, the tone here is old-fashioned, the pace slow, with mood and character, not action, of paramount concern. Saint-Germain's vampirism is low key; his presence acts mainly as a catalyst for the treacheries around him. Those who enjoy well-researched historical fiction will relish the detailed setting and the tangled plottings of the churchmen and secular agents whose mortal lives brush against that of the immortal undead. (Aug.)