Blood Doctor - Hardcover

Vine, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670912743 ISBN 13: 9780670912742

Publisher: Viking, 2002

Synopsis

The First Lord Nanther clearly hoped to be the subject of an admiring posthumous biography. Having built a name for himself as Queen Victoria’s favoured physician—expert on blood diseases, and particularly the royal disease of hemophilia—he fastidiously set about recording the details of his eminent life, carefully cataloguing every significant letter, diary and medical essay that he’d written, apparently offering himself up as an open book.

But when the present Lord Nanther begins to research the life of his great-grandfather, he soon realizes there is little of interest in his ancestor’s dry-as-dust account. Instead, he begins to suspect that these old records conceal more than they reveal as he comes upon mysteries and anomalies in almost every decade of his great-grandfather’s personal life. As Martin Nanther begins to catch glimpses of “some monstrous, quite appalling things” in the blood doctor’s past, he also realizes that Henry died a guilty man—carrying a horrific secret to the grave.

Set against the current reform of Britain’s House of Lords, which Martin Nanther witnesses at first hand with a kind of fascinated detachment, The Blood Doctor weaves effortlessly between the past and the present, public life and private life. The result is a superbly satisfying novel about ambition, obsession and bad blood.

“A story that glistens, sticks and unnerves.”—The Edmonton Journal

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Sometimes it’s best to leave the past alone. For when biographer Martin Nanther looks into the life of his famous great-grandfather Henry, Queen Victoria’s favorite physician, he discovers some rather unsettling coincidences, like the fact that the doctor married the sister of his recently murdered fiancée. The more Martin researches his distant relative, the more fascinated—and horrified—he becomes. Why did people have a habit of dying around his great grandfather? And what did his late daughter mean when she wrote that he’s done “monstrous, quite appalling things”?

Barbara Vine (a.k.a. Ruth Rendell) deftly weaves this story of an eminent Victorian with a modern yarn about the embattled biographer, who is watching the House of Lords prepare to annul membership for hereditary peers and thus strip him of his position. Themes of fate and family snake throughout this teasing psychological suspense, a typically chilling tale from a master of the genre.

From the Back Cover:

"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: Viking
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0670912743
• ISBN 13: 9780670912742
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 448