Barbara Vine: The Blood Doctor

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Henry Nanther, was Queen Victoria's physician whose specialist topic was haemophilia. His great-grandson Martin is researching a biography of his elusive relative, who left a carefully detailed, possibly misleading account of his life.

Vine lays out the labyrinth that was Henry's life against a backdrop of the about-to-be-reformed House of Lords. In the House, past and present merge. In Martin's present this story about blood, "blood in its metaphysical sense as the conductor as an inherited title, and blood as the transmitter of hereditary disease," bleeds into the past. His second wife Jude, desperate to conceive is plagued by miscarriages.

A many-layered mystery story with as complicated a bloodline as a Dostoyevsky novel.

Penguin

$34.95