The Blood Doctor Paperback - 2003

Summary

From the jacket 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 fiancee. 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.

Media 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