The Grave Tattoo

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This superb novel should make Gold Dagger-nominee McDermid's reputation and bring her new readers in droves. And with my interest in history and archaeology, I found the passages regarding the bog body, affectionately nicknamed “Pirate Peat” in the book by the forensic pathologist studying him, fascinating. The police are looking for Tenille and to add to Jane's problems, her ex-boyfriend, now Historical Document Dealer, is stalking Jane through the Lake District trying to get a lead on the important and valuable documents from Wordsworth that everyone believes exist. McDermid (A Clean Break) enters new ground with a dark tale that is more complex, more carefully crafted and far more disturbing than her Kate Brannigan mysteries.

The action drags just a little at the midway point but picks up again quickly, and you won’t guess whodunit until the very end -- or I didn’t, anyway. It is difficult to find words to capture the masterful achievement that is Val McDermid’s THE GRAVE TATTOO.As an added pleasure, much of the story is set in the grandeur of the Lake District, described with a poet’s eye. Turning off the personalised advertising setting won’t stop you from seeing Etsy ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive. And, while I think of it, the policeman who deals with the stuff in the Lakes is pretty bloody crap. Jane Gresham, a Wordsworth scholar, finds some evidence that suggests the existence of the manuscript and she sets out to hunt it down. THE GRAVE TATTOO may be her best book yet…part historical mystery, part chase thriller, but most of all a fascinating juxtaposition of upper-middle class academic mores and hard-bitten public-housing-project survival.

Between chapters is the Wordsworth verse of the Mutiny and Fletcher's explanation of all that happened, so that story is reveal slowly as well. In response to this, she believes that Wordsworth wrote a poem about Blyth that she wants to be the first to find. Despite being only 13, and having never travelled far from the council estate in her life, Tenille sets off to meet up with Jane.But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M. She has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. She doesn’t know that she’s racing her unscrupulous ex-lover Jake Hartnell and her brother Matthew, a resentful local schoolmaster, for the poem.

Put together all this along with several others on the hunt and you have a complicated but enjoyable mystery. It's summer in the Lake District and heavy rain over the fells has uncovered a bizarrely tattooed body. Val McDermid’s THE GRAVE TATTOO is an irresistible combination of contemporary psychological thriller and historical mystery filled with the moody atmosphere of the Lake District. This is one of those novels where the setting is the actually the premise for the story - but is also vividly rendered as the action unfolds. I felt it striving for the feel and style of Possession--academic scholars, romance, a mystery text.The question at hand is whether Christian escaped from Pitcairn Island and ended up back in the Lake District of England, where he reconnected with Wordsworth. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory.