A Love like Blood

Starred review from December 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.