The Blood Doctor: A Novel (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) - Softcover

Vine, Barbara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1400032520 ISBN 13: 9781400032525

Publisher: Pan Books, 2003

Synopsis

Biographer Martin Nanther, Hereditary Peer in the House of Lords, becomes fascinated by the life of his ancestor, Henry Nanther, physician to Queen Victoria's royal family and a specialist in haemophilia, whose fascination with blood may have driven down dark, violent, and criminal paths.

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:

"One of the finest practitioners of her craft in the English-speaking world.... [The Blood Doctor is] densely plotted, psychologically twisted." -The New York Times Book Review

"Combine[s] Edith Wharton's laserlike psychological and sociological notations with the elegance and intelligence Arthur Conan Doyle brought to genre writing.... [She is] the best mystery writer of our time." - The Boston Globe

"Vine is the subtlest of writers, and her book's quiet demeanor simply adds more nuance to its exquisite creepiness." -Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"One of the finest practitioners of her craft in the English-speaking world.... [The Blood Doctor is] densely plotted, psychologically twisted." -The New York Times Book Review

"This latest book is her best... suspenseful and intellectually engaging." -Chicago Tribune

About this edition

• Publisher: Pan Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1400032520
• ISBN 13: 9781400032525
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384