Author(s): Barbara Vine

Crime Thriller Mystery

Blood is going to be its theme ... Blood in its metaphysical sense as the conductor of an inherited title and blood as the transmitter of hereditary disease. Genes, we'd say now, but not in the nineteenth century when Henry Nanther was born and grew up and achieved a kind of greatness, not then. It was blood then. 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 haemophilia - 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. Indeed 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. Why did he prefer to marry a lowly solicitor's daughter rather than the upper-class girl who offered him entry into the social world he appeared to crave? What was the true explanation for the appalling tragedy that befell his fiancie? And why did his apparently successful life end in such pain and sorrow? As Martin Nanther begins to catch glimpses of 'some monstrous, quite appalling things' in the blood doctor's past, so he realises that Henry died a guilty man - carrying a horrific secret to the grave. (Preceeding text courtesy www.penguin.co.uk) Trade Paperback