Vine seems to have changed her tune a bit over the years since she parted company with her alter ego Ruth Rendell. I’m not finding her books as spookily creepy these days but they are still very good. In fact I think this is probably my favourite story of hers.

Blood is the overarching theme of this novel in several ways. The narrator Martin Nanther, 4th Lord Nanther is losing his heriditary seat in the House of Lords reforms. He’s also writing the biography of his great grandfather Henry, the 1st Lord Nanther who was a doctor specialising in diseases of the blood especially haemophilia. Henry received his baronetcy from Victoria, he was one of the royal physicans. The biographical research involves searching out his blood relatives from his family tree. His wife Jude is also suffering from miscarriage after miscarriage. Occassionally I found the continual theme of blood a bit icky and would have preferred that they’d stuck with describing things through the means of genes rather than the nineteenth century descriptions of blood but it’s not that sqeamish a book.

As with the last Vine I read (The Brimstone Wedding) I thought that there was scarcely any mystery here, Martin might not see what’s going on but it’s pretty obvious to the reader. There’s a huge cast of occassional characters and the family trees in the front of the book help to keep them straight. I thought Vine did a good job of making the book so populated and yet tractable. Personally I found the story fascinating, the plot’s long and tangled but not opaque and the mostly present tense writing isn’t obtrusive as it sometimes can be (it took me a long time to even notice it). Definitely a really good book but one so out of genre that I’d hesitate to recommend it.