Search Worlds Without End

Built by a madwoman during the Victorian era, Lake House is a 160-room mansion in the Adirondacks with stairways that lead nowhere, bizarre rooms designed to distort the senses, endless series of mazelike halls-and a century-long history of violent deaths.

Lauren Montgomery, her son Garrett, and her new rock star husband Stephen Ransom have just arrived at Lake House, anticipating a long and relaxing summer. But what they don't know is that their rental home is actually a labyrinthine puzzle at whose center lurks something unspeakably evil...

Hovern Bog. People live in terror of it-especially the residents of Fenchurch St. Jude, the little village located at its edge. They think of it as a living being. They've seen it reach out with sinewy tentacles... to take, entangle, and digest.

When 2000-year-old bodies are recovered from the bog, perfectly preserved, it is the discovery of a lifetime for archaeologist David Macauley. But close examination of the corpses reveals a curious fact: all were cruelly, mysteriously murdered, gnawed to death by some unimaginable creature. Soon it becomes apparent that whatever tortured and killed the bodies from ancient times still roams the bog, and no one in Fenchurch St. Jude - especially David and his family - is safe.

They are cool to the touch and alluringly beautiful in their ageless youth. Their laughter seduces, their brilliance beguiles. They guard the secrets of science and history, and the answers to the mysteries of life and death lie within their vastly superior knowledge. In centuries past, they were known as the Illuminati. They are the vampire.

Dr. John Gladstone, a scientist in Victorian London, is thrust into their world after his carriage runs over a young man of angelic beauty named Niccolo. When Niccolo kidnaps Gladstone's child and vanishes, the doctor must go in pursuit, with the help of his daughter, Ursula, who is enticed by the lure of eternal life, and Lady Hespeth, whose demure exterior hides a dangerous obsession. Why are the vampires taking children, and what is the connection to Gladstone's experiments with a deadly virus? And how can he possibly prevail against a race of immortal beings with power and intelligence infinitely beyond his own?