Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
In Sedgwick's first adult fiction, Charles Jackson, a young World War II soldier, happens upon a horrific crimea perverted ritual?that haunts him for decades.In 1944, Jackson visited the Muse des Antiquits 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 Dsseldorf. 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." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* This adult debut portends a tremendous second act from acclaimed YA author Sedgwick. In the aftermath of D-Day, young soldier Charles Jackson is allowed to tour a reclaimed Paris museum, and there, in an adjacent bunker, he stumbles across a sight that will forever change and damn him: a man crouched over a prone woman, apparently drinking her blood. Charles runs and regrets it even years later, when he meets a beautiful American named Marian. Charles comes to find that she is in the employ of the very man he saw in the bunker, and so begins a lifelong cat-and-mouse game that will take Charles all across Europe and to the edge of sanity as he pursues What? A vampire? An occultist? A psychotic? Sedgwick's prose is nothing short of gorgeous; his patient, almost procedural tracking of Charles' decades of wandering has a nineteenth-century elegance, especially as Charles' obsession shreds into torment and he begins to look like a Victor Frankenstein, plodding to Earth's ends in search of a monster to which he feels morally, and mortally, tied. Charles is a hematologist, and Sedgwick plumbs continual red metaphors: we are all, through hate or passion or simple biology, controlled by what shuttles through our veins. Here's a novel that tastes of blood and dust, just as a fine old-fashioned horror novel should.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2010 Booklist