A Love Like Blood: A Novel

by Marcus Sedgwick Narrated by Shaun Grindell

Overview

The first novel for adults by hugely acclaimed YA writer Marcus Sedgwick is a gripping saga of love, revenge, and obsession-and vampires.

In 1944, just days after the liberation of Paris, Charles Jackson sees something horrific: a man in a dark tunnel, apparently drinking the blood of a murdered woman. Terrified, he does nothing, telling himself afterward that worse tragedies happen during war.

Seven years later he returns to the city-and sees the same man dining in the company of a fascinating, beautiful young woman. When they leave the restaurant, Charles decides to follow ...

A Love like Blood is a dark, compelling thriller about how a man's life can change in a moment and about where the desire for truth-and revenge-can lead.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 12/22/2014
YA author Sedgwick (Midwinter Blood) shifts triumphantly to adult fiction with this moving and multifaceted thriller, in which he subtly draws the reader into the haunted world of Englishman Charles Jackson, whom we meet as a 25-year-old captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps in August 1944. Shortly after the liberation of Paris, Jackson takes a break from his duties to visit the Musée des Antiquités Nationales in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, housed in a chateau that served as German Army headquarters during the occupation. A noise leads him to investigate an abandoned bunker, where he encounters a man hunched over the lifeless body of a young woman, drinking her blood from a wound in her chest. Stunned by this horrific vision, Jackson flees. He soon returns to the scene, only to find the pair have vanished. Seven years later, still tormented by his belief that he could have saved the woman’s life, Jackson spots the man again, and he becomes consumed with the fear that the predator will strike again. Sedgwick maintains a high level of tension up until the devastating conclusion. (Feb.)

Bookreporter

Sedgwick’s books for young people are often dark and atmospheric, filled with vivid images and packed with horror, beauty and suspense. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that in his adult debut, A Love Like Blood, Sedgwick turns to a classic subgenre of horror fiction: the vampire story.

Booklist (starred)

This adult debut portends a tremendous second act from acclaimed YA author Sedgwick. Sedgwick’s prose is nothing short of gorgeous. Here’s a novel that tastes of blood and dust, just as a fine old-fashioned horror novel should.

Booklist

This adult debut portends a tremendous second act from acclaimed YA author Sedgwick. Sedgwick’s prose is nothing short of gorgeous. Here’s a novel that tastes of blood and dust, just as a fine old-fashioned horror novel should.

Booklist

This adult debut portends a tremendous second act from acclaimed YA author Sedgwick. Sedgwick’s prose is nothing short of gorgeous. Here’s a novel that tastes of blood and dust, just as a fine old-fashioned horror novel should.

Kirkus Reviews

2014-11-20
In Sedgwick's first adult fiction, Charles Jackson, a young World War II soldier, happens upon a horrific crime—a perverted ritual?—that haunts him for decades.In 1944, Jackson visited the Musée des Antiquités Nationales. Wandering the grounds, he stumbled into a bunker, where he glimpsed a nameless man drinking a young woman's blood. Shocked and fearful, he fled. War over, Jackson continued his medical studies, eventually becoming a researcher in hematology at Cambridge University, but his memory of the bunker scene, tinged by guilt, persisted. Thus begins a tale of blood obsession, ripe with symbolism drawn from St. Catherine of Siena, Dante, and from psychology giants like Freud and Ernest Jones. Remembering the bunker scene, Jackson eagerly accepts an invitation to a Paris conference. There, while revisiting the Saint-Germaine museum, he meets Marian, an American Ph.D. student, and immediately falls in love. Marian, however, is teaching English to a man named Verovkin, who turns out to be the bunker blood-drinker from years before. A stumbling romance develops, but Marian, in Verovkin's sway, is killed, and Jackson becomes obsessed: "I wasn't sure I wanted to live, but I did know one thing clearly: that I wanted him dead." Sedgwick's tale chronicles Jackson's mania: Jackson follows Verovkin to Avignon, then Lusanne, and finally to Sextantio, Italy. In the intense narrative, Jackson devolves, a scholar descending into the Nietzschean abyss and turning killer, but Verovkin is static, left to interpretation either as a perverted hemolagniac or a mimic of serial killers like the Vampire of Düsseldorf. In this macabre psychological thriller, Sedgwick offers atmospheric settings and a relentless, chilling plot that gives a whole new meaning to the idea of "blood feud."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169836851
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	03/17/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

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