Grave Tattoo

This is my 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.

I think this is the fourth Val McDermid novel I have read. It is certainly an interesting combination of intellectual exercise and detective work. Like the other McDermid novels I have read, this one has a "mysterious bad guy" who keeps doing evil things without being clearly identified. Based on the other novels, I was able to narrow the suspects down to a small group. I was pleased to see that the bad guy did not turn out to be from the same category of people as in "The Distant Echo" and "The Torment of Others." As a scholar, I sympathize with heroine Jane Gresham and I loathe the greedy people who see old manuscripts as mere path to profit. Here's to the preservers of priceless manuscripts for the world to see!

In The Grave Tattoo, our story begins when a very old and tattooed body is found in a British peat bog. Wordsworth scholar Jane Gresham wonders if the body might be that of Fletcher Christian, and if it could lend credence to her theory of a missing Wordsworth poem, one no one has seen before, regarding the truth of the events surrounding the mutiny on the Bounty. As she prepares to go out of town to find out for herself, she's left with one problem: young Tenille, a brilliant but very poor thirteen-year-old girl with an interest in poetry who lives in the same building as Jane. Tenille's aunt has been bringing home a new boyfriend who's clearly interested in Tenille, and Jane doesn't want to leave until she knows Tenille is safe. She visits Tenille's estranged father, a local criminal, and unwittingly sets into motion a series of events that'll result in Tenille fleeing to join Jane in the rural lands of the Lake District. Unfortunately Jane has problems of her own dogging her studies: her list of people to interview in search of the missing documents seems to have become the game plan of a murderer. Each time she interviews another aging local, they die shortly thereafter. Soon the police suspect her of all sorts of things, including harboring Tenille and murdering the locals. One of the things I love most about McDermid's writing is her fully-fleshed-out characters. She indulges in what for most writers would be an unusually large cast of characters in her books, and yet each one is complex and interesting. Even side characters have their own relationships and viewpoints and histories; I never feel that someone made an appearance as a plot device, nor do relationships get treated as plot devices or formulae. This results in a web of relationships and interactions that feel wholly natural rather than planned out by an author, as though McDermid simply stepped aside and allowed her characters to tell us their own story. The mystery, too, is quite fascinating. It starts out as a question of who the mysterious body might be and whether Jane's speculative document exists, and slowly becomes a murder investigation. McDermid is one of the better mystery writers out there in my opinion; while at times I thought I had the murders figured out, McDermid managed to sow enough doubt in my mind that I could never be entirely sure. And while I know virtually nothing about Wordsworth, she made the mystery of his potential missing poem and the circumstances surrounding it absolutely fascinating.

I've read many of McDermid's books. I must admit I bought this one simply because it involves the infamous mutiny on the Bounty, and Wordsworth. I have long been intrigued by both, though Wordsworth perhaps isn't as popular as he once was. And if any writer could somehow combine these two elements, it is Val McDermid. Let's see: there's a post doctoral Wordsworth scholar, a smart thirteen-year-old, a centuries-old body in a bog in the Lake District which may or may not be Fletcher Christian, a lost manuscript that may or may not exist, a few murders sprinkled in throughout, and everyone in the story seems motivated by self interest. When reading this novel, trust no one's motives. Jane works two jobs while trying to turn her doctoral thesis into a book; she lives in council housing, amongst the poor, the criminals and the criminally negligent of the East End, and is lonesome and nostalgic about her home in the Lake District. She is befriended by a rough young girl named Tenille, who hates school but loves poetry. McDermid has created a wonderful character in this tough, wise, scared and scary girl. McDermid in fact has done a great thing with all the characters in this tale, and with the plot, twisted, tangled, slow to get started and sometimes racing along, and with scene and mood. No one writes about urban grit and grime like McDermid, but she does an equally expert job of the countryside to which all major characters retire to then become involved in a race to discover: is there a lost epic poem based on Christian's adventures? Did he in fact manage to return to England and live, and if so, was he then dispatched in a peat bog, and if so, why? Who can Jane really trust, Jake, the ex lover, Dan the stalwart friend, her brother Matthew, beset by jealousy, Tenille, who turns up on the run from the cops in London (as a body has turned up there,)and who proceeds to "help" Jane search for the missing poem? Can she really trust the curator at the Wordsworth Trust? Dead bodies are produced at an alarming rate. Jane is followed, watched, stalked, a near victim of a hit-and-run, then she's hit on the head, and she has to help Tenille stay one step ahead of the police, and she has to figure out who would want the missing manuscript enough to kill for it. I never knew scholars had this much excitement. Excitement is what you'll find, from the lanquid and stifling beginning in London, to the thrill of getting closer to her objective, Jane goes from being blissfully concentrated on her search to being crafty with the cops. "All landscapes hold their own secrets. Layer on layer, the past is buried beneath the surface. Seldom irretrievable, it lurks, waiting for human agency or meteorological accident to force the skeleton up through flesh and skin back into the present. Like the poor, the past is always with us." I was hooked. In the midst of these several mysteries and betrayals, you'll find human failings and inconsistencies, and some excellent

Growing up in Fellhead in the English Lake Country area, Jane Gresham has heard numerous times the story of Fletcher Christian escaping the massacre at Pitcairn Island and returning to England where his schoolmate William Wordsworth gave him shelter. Further word of mouth through the generations is that Wordsworth wrote an epic poem re the adventures that the mutineer related to him, but this alleged work was either hidden or lost. Everything suddenly changes when a corpse dated from the first half of the nineteenth century is uncovered in a nearby peat bog. The townsfolk immediately claim Fletcher has been found. Jane, a Wordsworth academic, sees an opportunity to determine whether the great poet ever did a take on Bounty mutiny and if true she wants to find the poem. Unbeknownst to the scholar is that her unprincipled former boyfriend and her acrimonious jealous brother amongst others seek the poem for personal gain with one willing to kill to succeed. This is a fascinating mystery with present day "detectives" seeking a potential lost nineteenth century masterpiece. The switch back and forth between the two centuries is smooth and gripping as Val McDermid shows her talent at its best. Though the killer seems ironically obvious to readers, fans who appreciate something a bit different will want to read this wonderful literary sleuthing thriller. Harriet Klausner