World Order and Citizenship

Structure and Form in Bloodline by Sidney Sheldon Bloodline by the mystery and suspense novelist Sidney Sheldon is a nail-biting mystery thriller told from multiple perspectives of a cast of different characters, all with slightly shady pasts, all with a reason to want the young, beautiful, determined -- but slightly naive victim dead.

At the beginning of the book, the soon-to-be victimized, twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth Roffe ("tragically" born a girl, in her father's eyes) is left the heiress of a multibillion-dollar drug company, Roffe and Sons after her father's suspicious death (Sheldon 101). Although she is at the helm of the company, four of her cousins are still co-owners of the company.

All of them want to make money, quickly, so they pressure her to make the company public, but Elizabeth wants to retain control over the fortune and power she has just inherited, even if this may make the company's financial backers choke over their morning coffee. After all, a woman has never stood at the helm of Roffe and Sons. Elizabeth will not bend to their pressure and instead relies upon the guidance of her trusted advisor Rhys Williams.

The cousins vying for power within the company all have different backgrounds, and all have good reasons for disliking Elizabeth, although some of them, such as Alec, were kind to Elizabeth when she was a younger child. As well as detailing the different brushes with death Elizabeth experiences before she is apparently murdered, the story includes flashbacks of the bizarre lives of the likely suspects.

This creates a sense of suspense, because the reader is never sure if he or she is identifying with a possible killer or psychopath, as the story unfolds.

It is clear early on that the stakes are high and Elizabeth's life is in danger because of the power she assumes -- but from whom? The reader alternately feels sympathy with and repulsion for all of the Roffe cousins, as his or her perspective moves from that of the British, womanizing Alec, Parisian Helene and her husband Charles (who "married her for her name and her money") from Paris, the German Anna from Berlin who is married to a man thirteen years her junior, and Italian Ivo (Sheldon 70; 282).

The author tries to make the occasionally confusing plot line, back story, and the many characters less so by titling the different chapters by location and when the events are taking place, like "Istanbul, Saturday, September 5th Ten p.m." (Sheldon 1). This also creates a sense of excitement, as things seem to be evolving on a moment-by-moment basis at times, while at other times taking leisurely detours into the past.

When there are more extended scenes these scenes seem to increase in weight and importance, such as the scene in which Elizabeth learns that she has been left the majority of her father's stock in the company. Although the reader identifies with all of the characters, there is a certain distance as well, that creates a cool tone in this page-turner, because of the third person omniscient point-of-view that Sheldon uses.

Sheldon tells a surprising amount about the characters, however, and he usually speaks with confidence about their characters and what they are thinking. He tells.