Blood and Gold

Blood & Gold tells the story of Marius. His story was explored in The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned and The Vampire Armand, thus most of this book just retells what is already known with little new bits added to the mix.
The history again is the main draw in this instalment, the rise and fall of great civilizations as well as their cultures and art are shown through the eyes of the more intellectual and learned of Rice's vampires.
Marius is one of the oldest vampires; however instead of wise Marius comes off as very pretentious and self-righteous. He is always in the right about everything and everyone else is in the wrong. Marius says he likes to be a teacher to all the vampires he has with him; however, he comes off as more of the authority, who wants his pupils' absolute obedience. Any vampire who argued with Marius gets a completely disproportionate response from him: Pandora, Mael, when Armand defied him (and a great deal of Marius's distrust of Armand seems to stem as much from his unwillingness to follow exactly the path Marius laid down as anything else), any vampire he has been with.
Marius still does not know what he wants: he wants Pandora but he wants her gone when she is with him; he ‘loves' Bianca but doesn't want to turn her until it becomes convenient for him; he falls in love with Armand but when Armand stops being ‘perfect' in Marius's eyes, he just leaves Armand to fend for himself. It is the actions (or the lack of actions) after Armand is taken from him, that makes it clear that Marius loves to run away from his problems and cannot deal with flaws in other vampires.
The women, as seems to be a theme, have the potential to be strong and interesting – Eudoxia, Pandora, Bianca, Zenobia – but whenever they develop to a point where they are not in Marius's shadow, they leave him and are hardly mentioned outside of Marius's company.