Not the worst (see 'Memnoch' for that) but certainly the most boring of all the Chronicles so far. I pretty much gave up on the series after 'Queen', but since I bought the whole lot, I'm wading through it still. However, it took me this long to realise that the problem with Rice's writing is that there is no beginning, middle and end. Funnily enough, real life biographies have more sense of a dramatic arc than this book, for example. The 'exotic' settings have become old hat pretty much since the second book and even if Marius is Rice's most developed character as some here claim--although I'm not sure--his predicament is also pretty much a rehash of whatever the other characters in the series have gone through in their respective tales. Also, the secondary characters in this book become real mainly through the fact that the knowledgeable reader connects them with earlier books in the series. Not worth the 570 pages. And don't these vampires ever shut up?