Is the history of a dangerous love affair destined to be repeated? At the height of her career, opera singer Katherina Marov is stunned by her father's suicide. Reading his journals, she learns of his dark days as a soldier on the Russian front and in war-torn Berlin. She cannot condemn him for his crimes and secrets, though, for while she is learning of his demons, she is discovering her own. The stage-world she lives in draws her into an ecstatic realm beyond good and evil and she is tempted, as he was, by a love for a woman that could destroy her. Has she too made a devil's pact? And if so, will she pay for it, as her father did, with her life?...

Eros, art, and gorgeous blasphemy...

Adrianna Borgia, survivor of the Borgia court, presents Michelangelo with the greatest temptations of his life while struggling herself with soul-threatening desires and heresies. Her growing passion for the painter Raphaela Bramante mirrors the sculptor's damnable interest in a castrato in the Sistine choir and in the ideas of secular humanism. Claimed as the epitome of Christian inspiration, Michelangelo's ceiling is revealed as a coup of Eros upon religion, a gorgeous blasphemy and a paean to forbidden love in the very heart of the Church. ...