The Blood Doctor

by Barbara Vine

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400032525
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/11/2003
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.21(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.85(d)

About the Author

The author of numerous novels, including A Dark-Adapted Eye, Anna’s Book, and Grasshopper, Barbara Vine is a pen name of Ruth Rendell. Rendell has won many awards, including three Edgars and four Gold Daggers. She lives in London, England.

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher

Biographer Martin Nanther turns detective when he attempts a life of the great-grandfather who earned the family its peerage and its curse-in Ruth Rendell's tenth suspenser under the Vine byline (Grasshopper, 2000, etc.), a meticulous tale that moves with the balefully majestic force of a submerged iceberg. Intrigued by a letter in which his subject's youngest daughter claimed half a century after his death that "Henry Nanther did . . . monstrous, quite appalling things," Martin soon finds that Henry's life is shrouded in mystery and fatality. One of Queen Victoria's physicians, an expert on hemophilia, he seemed the pillar of rectitude even before he took his seat in the House of Lords in 1896. Yet the death of his medical-school friend Richard Fox Hamilton in a celebrated train wreck seems to have killed Henry's humanity. He kept Jemima ("Jimmy") Ashworth as a mistress for eight years, discarding both her and beautiful, wealthy aristocrat Olivia Batho when he became engaged to Eleanor Henderson, then reacting to Eleanor's murder by marrying her sister Edith. Why didn't Henry propose to the incomparably eligible Olivia, and why was he in such haste to marry his fiancee's sister? As Martin patiently traces the story of Henry and his family through letters, diaries, travels, and interviews, his descent into the well of the past unearths unnerving parallels between Henry's story and his own. Married to a younger woman desperate for her own children but prone to miscarriages, watching the House of Lords prepare to annul membership for hereditary peers and so turn him out to pasture, he finds no refuge from his present sorrows in researching the life of an ancestor who turns out to be bothpitiable and truly monstrous, the architect of a crime that has outlived him for generations. A dense, dazzling exploration of the biographer as detective, and of the truism that blood will tell.

Kirkus Reviews