Blood Doctor - Softcover

Vine, Barbara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141009160 ISBN 13: 9780141009162

Publisher: Penguin Canada, 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

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: Penguin Canada
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0141009160
• ISBN 13: 9780141009162
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 448