The Blood


Detective

‘The past isn’t like that; you can’t just bury it, mark it down as history. It’s taken more than 125 years, but the events of 1879 have finally washed up…’

The Blood Detective is published in August 2008 - have a sneak preview by reading an extract here.

It’s not the best start to DCI Grant Foster’s day: standing over a mutilated body in a windswept London churchyard. Although the killer has left a cryptic and brutal clue.

It is only when the clue is handed to Nigel Barnes, a specialist in compiling family trees, that the full message becomes spine-chillingly clear. For it leads Barnes back more than one hundred years – to the victim of a demented Victorian serial killer……

When a second body is discovered Foster needs Barnes’s skills more than ever. Because the murderer’s clues appear to run along the tangled bloodlines that lie between 1879 and now. And if Barnes is right about his blood-history, the killing has only just begun…

By the author of the bestselling Who Do You Think You Are? books comes a haunting novel of blood-stained family histories and gruesome secrets.

‘Explores the past echoing in the present with greater skill and knowledge than most. Expertly plotted, with great attention to detail.’
Mark Billingham

‘Elegant writing, engaging characters, a cracking climax.’  Reginald Hill

‘A great read and an intriguing way of linking the grisly past to the crimes of the present.’
Kate Mosse

‘A fascinating and original investigation into the dark roots of our family trees.’
Val McDermid

Murder by family tree
Dan Waddell tells us where the idea for The Blood Detective came from.
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London Crime
Dan Waddell explains what drew him to West London as a scene for murder.
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Dan Waddell

Dan Waddell was born in Pudsey, West Yorkshire in 1972, the son of cult Geordie television darts commentator Sid Waddell. He trained as a journalist in Sheffield after leaving university and and took his first job in York as a reporter at a press agency selling stories to national newspapers, highbrow and low. In 1997 he moved to London where he led a schizophrenic life freelancing for several national newspapers including The Daily Telegraph, The Mail on Sunday, The People and The Daily Star. He worked full-time at The Daily Telegraph before the opportunity came to write a book for the BBC about cricket. He then wrote several books on sport and popular culture and ghost wrote The Cloud Garden, a true story about the adventure of two young Brits kidnapped and held hostage by Colombian guerrillas.

In 2003 his son Dougie was born. His birth meant the name Waddell would continue for at least another generation. Dan took great satisfaction in this and then found himself wondering why. He started, for the first time, to think about his family’s past and his ancestors who had passed this name down the generations. He began researching his family tree and within a few hours uncovered a family secret that had lain undisturbed for decades. As an (almost) reformed tabloid journalist, the whiff of scandal whetted his appetite. He realised that genealogy was not simply a painstaking trawl though dusty, fusty files - it is a a quest that can lead to the most astonishing revelations, not least the fact that our ancestors were human beings as flawed as we were. He was asked to write the book that accompanied the BBC TV series Who Do You Think You Are?, which became a bestseller. He also wrote the book that accompanied the second series.

During this time he had the idea that eventually became The Blood Detective: how dark secrets from the past can come back to haunt the present. Ever since he read Emille and the Detectives as a child he’d been an avid reader of crime fiction. His interest in genealogy and the dark side of our family history, combined with his passion for crime novels, led to the creation of The Blood Detective.

Dan now lives in London with his son.

Find out more about Dan Waddell and his interest in genealogy in our Q&A here.

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