Product Description

Barbara Vine's new novel is about blood - blood in its metaphysical sense as the conductor of an inherited title and blood in its physical sense as the transmitter of disease. 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. The Blood Doctor weaves effortlessly between past and present, public life and private life. The result is a superbly satisfying novel about ambition, obsession and bad blood.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #193131 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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

About the Author
Barbara Vine is the pen-name of Ruth Rendell. Viking has published her ten previous novels, including A Dark-Adapted Eye, which won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award, and most recently The Chimney-Sweeper's Boys and Grasshopper - both bestsellers. Ruth Rendell sits in the House of Lords as a Labour peer. She lives in Maida Vale, London.