The Blood Doctor - Softcover

Vine, Barbara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141009160 ISBN 13: 9780141009162

Publisher: Penguin, 2003

Synopsis

The Blood Doctor by Barbara Vine - a crime masterpiece about ambition, obsession and bad blood

'An outstandingly original book' Sunday Times

The current Lord Nanther, experiencing the reform of the House of Lords, embarks on a biography of his great-grandfather, the first Lord Nanther, favoured physician to Queen Victoria, expert on blood diseases and particularly the royal disease of haemophilia. What he uncovers begins to horrify him as he realizes that Nanther died a guilty man - carrying a horrific secret to the grave.

Weaving effortlessly between past and present, public life and private life, The Blood Doctoris a superbly satisfying novel that will be adored by readers of P.D. James, Ian Rankin and Scott Turow.

'A magnificent novel' Daily Mail

'Intriguing and absorbing and wholly satisfying' Spectator
'Plotted with a jeweller's intricacy and ominous to the final sentence' Sunday Telegraph

Barbara Vine is the pen-name of Ruth Rendell. She has written fifteen novels using this pseudonym, including A Fatal Inversion and King Solomon's Carpet which both won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. Her other books include: A Dark Adapted Eye; The House of Stairs; Gallowglass; Asta's Book; No Night Is Too Long; In the Time of His Prosperity; The Brimstone Wedding; The Chimney Sweeper's Boy; Grasshopper; The Blood Doctor; The Minotaur; The Birthday Present and The Child's Child.

About this title

Review:

In The Blood Doctor, as in others of the books she has written as Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell stretches the boundaries of what we mean when we describe a book as a psychological thriller. Nanther is a biographer who is in crisis in most areas of his life--he has run out of inspiration, his other "job" as a hereditary peer is in the course of being voted out of existence and his relationship with his second wife is threatened by the difficulties she is experiencing in bringing a child to term. He throws himself into a study of his great-grandfather Henry--a doctor ennobled by Queen Victoria for his work on the haemophilia which dogged her descendants--and finds something not quite right. Henry was not just a repressed Victorian--there was something about his ruthless jilting of mistresses and fiancées which implies something a lot more peculiar and Nanther sets out to work out what it was. This novel is acute on the intellectual pleasures of historical research including the guilty prurience of working out dead people's secrets; it is also genuinely insightful in its portrait of Nanther, a man who thinks he is a worse and more useless man than he is, and finds out from Henry what real human evil might be. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

'A magnificent novel.' (The Daily Mail)

'Intriguing and absorbing and wholly satisfying.' (The Spectator)

'Plotted with a jeweller's intricacy and ominous to the final sentence.' (The Sunday Telegraph)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0141009160
• ISBN 13: 9780141009162
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 480