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Author name: Val McDermid

: The Grave Tattoo
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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780312936105
ISBN number: 0312936109
Label: St. Martin's Minotaur
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Minotaur
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 448
Printing Date: April 29, 2008
Publishing house: St. Martin's Minotaur
Release Date: April 29, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 66244
Studio: St. Martin's Minotaur



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After summer rains uncover a corpse bearing tattoos like those of eighteenth-century seafarers, many residents of the English Lake District can’t help but wonder whether it’s the body of one of the town’s most legendary fugitives.



Scholar and native Lakelander Jane Gresham feels compelled to finally discover the truth about the myths and buried secrets rooted in her hometown. What she never expected was to find herself at the heart of a 200-year-old mystery that still has the power to put lives on the line. And with each new lead she pursues, death follows hard on her heels….





Customer Reviews
User popularity level: out of 5 stars

Rated by buyers 4 out of 5 stars - "The hiddenness of it all"

Wordsworth scholar Jane Gresham is living in a tough London housing project while she turns her thesis into a book. The chance of a lifetime presents itself when a long-buried tattooed body is given up by a peat bog in Jane's Lake District home town - William Wordsworth's territory. HMS Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian grew up in the area and there is a local legend that after his sojourn on Pitcairn Island, Christian returned to the Lakes. Jane has a theory that Christian told his story to Wordsworth who turned it into an epic poem that has never been found. Realizing that the bog body's tattoos suggest a South Seas connection, Jane goes home to the Lakes to pursue her dream of finding a long-missing manuscript.

Author Val McDermid moves the action from the crime-ridden London streets to Jane's not-so-tranquil home town. The literary mystery plays itself out satisfyingly, but not in libraries and dusty archives. Real people with their passions for the hunt converge on the scene. McDermid's cast of characters is unusually rich and well-drawn, from the 13-year-old city waif to the sexy forensic anthropologist to the aging-hippie museum curator; their stories intersect plausibly with Jane's. The settings come vividly to life.

The Grave Tattoo is a tightly plotted, absorbing read. There may be slightly too much of a good thing here, if that's possible, and while the action moves well, some of the character development could have been sacrificed to a brisker pace. The sections on Wordsworth and Christian are intriguing and more development and resolution of their story would be welcome. Even with those reservations, three cheers and four stars; I plan to read more from this author.

Linda Bulger, 2008


Rated by buyers 4 out of 5 stars - The mystery that was Fletcher Christian
Every now and then, a favorite author undertakes a change in focus and invites us along for the ride. In this case, Val McDermid has taken a break from her three series (the most beloved of which is probably the Hill/Jordan chain that spawned the British "Wire in the Blood" television dramas). She takes a scholarly approach in re-examining the story of the "Mutiny on the Bounty" and, more specifically, the notion that Fletcher Christian did not die on Pitcairn Island but instead returned to England and evaded detection until his much-later genuine death. The story is told through the activities of a modern literary scholar named Jane Gresham, whose specialty is the works of William Wordsworth, who was actually a contemporary of Fletcher Christian at the Cockermouth Free School in Cumbria. McDermid uses this relationship as a nifty vehicle where Wordsworth speaks to and about Christian in flashback vignettes that are staggered through the book. As the book progresses, Gresham becomes increasingly convinced that she's on the track not only of a Fletcher Christian who was in close communication with his old friend Wordsworth, but also of an epic poem written by Wordsworth to explain the mutiny in new and shocking terms intended to exculpate Christian.

As you might expect from McDermid, there is a great deal of tension in the story with the requisite betrayals in the academic community and the truly nasty world of antiquities auctions. Some of these folks were almost too cartoonlike and it felt like perhaps some ancient scores were being settled with the characterizations. Truly the most interesting character in the book is Tenille, a 13-year-old tenement child with a love of Romantic literature and a mouth like a sea dog. She is mesmerizing and the book comes to a special plateau when she is in the room.

This is a good-but-not-great McDermid but I have to give her credit for attempting such a diversion from her usual fare. I think that the pacing was a little thick for such a tome and one or two subplots might have been abandoned in service of a smoother read, but this is small stuff. It was a very interesting approach to the mystery that was Fletcher Christian.


Rated by buyers 3 out of 5 stars - Engrossing, But Weak
This was my very first McDermid book and I enjoyed it enough to read more of her works. And I take at face value remarks by other reviewers that this wasn't her best work, so I hope I will be pleased with the others. This book had a fascinating premise -- the search for a Wordsworth poem based on the thesis that his old school pal Fletcher Christian of Mutiny on the Bounty fame had returned to England and whose bones were found in a present-day peat bog. But, I felt that the plot was not strong enough to support all the killing and intrigue that ensued. I found the ending weak, if not predictible. I found some of the characters unbelieveable. On the other hand, I found the book engrossing and I learned a lot about Wordsworth and the fabled Lake District. A good, but not a great read.


Rated by buyers 3 out of 5 stars - Not Bad, But Not The Best From This Author
Scholar, Jane Gresham, returns to her native Lake District, in Northern England, to search for a missing poem, that she believes exists, written by William Wordsworth. The words of this poem suggest that his friend, Fletcher Christian of HMS Bounty fame, had returned to his native England, years after the mutiny, that had occurred onboard that ship.

However, she is not the only person on the trail of the missing poem, and someone else, is willing to kill, in order to get their hands on it.

I felt this book was quite slow moving, for the very first couple of hundred pages, and I thought the main character Jane Gresham, living in a small, high rise flat, in a very rough, built up area of London, as being a bit unrealistic, as she is clearly not only middle class, but from the rural area of the Lake District, as well. Another important character, the poetry loving teenager, Tenille, did not ring true for me, either.

However, allowing for all of the above, the story does improve as the book progresses, and wasn't too bad a read, overall. If you are new to this author I would recommend the 'Torment Of Others', or 'A Place Of Execution', ahead of this book.



Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - Kathy in St Louis
This is my very first experience reading a McDermid book. As such, I did not know what to expect but was very pleasantly surprised by the plot and sub-plots of the book.

The Grave Tatoo is a take off from the traditional mystery as described by other reviewers but I enjoyed that interesting change from the typical "who done it."

McDermid's story holds up throughout the book. It is a solid read and well worth your time reading it.

I look forward to reading more of her work.



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