The Grave Tattoo

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And there he told his story to an old friend and schoolmate, William Wordsworth, who turned it into a long narrative poem – a poem that remained hidden lest it expose Wordsworth to the gallows for harbouring a fugitive. River Wilde who is in charge of the autopsy procedures for “Pirate Pete” the body in the bog who fits the time period and some of the markings of Fletcher Christian.

Val has served as a judge for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize, and was Chair of the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. Here she has bitten off some pretty big chunks - missing Wordsworth letters and possibly a poem that might tell the story of mutineer Fletcher Christian who came from the same part of the world and was connected to Wordsworth; the discovery of a body in a bog who may or may not be Fletcher Christian; three (or is it 4?

A superb psychological thriller in which present-day murder has its roots in the eighteenth century and the mutiny on the Bounty.

Unlike old friends, who have a way of changing careers, marital status or religious affiliation when you lose touch, series detectives can usually be counted on to stay in town and on the job until they drop. The additional story of Jane's friendship and growing love for a young 13 year old black girl, Tenille Cole (her neighbour in Marshpool, one of London's rundown public housing projects), rounds out the story nicely, adds a tinge of modern day reality, lifts the tale out of the somewhat stuffy world of pure academia and gives The Grave Tattoo overall a somewhat more US-centric thriller flavour. All it takes is one good man — a detective, of course — to humanize events that confound understanding.

parties racing to find papers and identities, some mostly honorable, some less so, some distinctly nasty. An interesting mix of historical facts and fiction in a contemporary setting based around the premise that a newly unearthed tattooed body in a Lakeland peat bog is the Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian. The ratings/reviews displayed here may not be representative of every listing on this page, or of every review for these listings. THE GRAVE TATTOO is a standalone book from the prolific and well-known author of, amongst many others, The Wire In The Blood series. I might be tempted to say that The Grave Tattoo was Val McDermid writing a pastiche of Reginald Hill parodying The Da Vinci Code.

The McGuffin in this case is a putative lost epic poem by William Wordsworth, based on the story of Fletcher Christian (a Maryport lad, who went to school with Willie).

McDermid employs such ingenious, unexpected plot twists that I was left open-mouthed on numerous occasions.