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    The Grave Tattoo: A Novel
    The Grave Tattoo: A Novel
    The Grave Tattoo: A Novel
    Audiobook13 hours

    The Grave Tattoo: A Novel

    Written by Val McDermid

    Narrated by Kate Reading

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    About this audiobook

    In The Grave Tattoo, suspense master Val McDermid spins a psychological thriller in which a present-day murder has its roots in the eighteenth century and the mutiny on the H.M.S. Bounty.

    After torrential summer rains uncover a bizarrely tattooed body on a Lake District hillside, a long-disregarded old wives' tale takes on a chilling new plausibility. For centuries, Lakelanders have whispered that Fletcher Christian, made infamous by Mutiny on the Bounty, staged the massacre on Pitcairn so that he could return home. And once there, what if he could tell 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 harboring a fugitive?

    Wordsworth specialist Jane Gresham, herself a native of the Lake District, feels compelled to discover once and for all whether the manuscript ever existed—and whether it still exists today. But as she pursues each new lead, death follows hard on her heels. Suddenly Jane is at the heart of a 200-year-old mystery that still has the power to put lives on the line.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateFeb 1, 2007
    ISBN9781427200648
    Author

    Val McDermid

    Val McDermid is the author of many crime novels and has created the notable characters Lindsay Gordon, Karen Pirie, Kate Brannigan and Tony Hill. Her novels have been translated into forty languages and have sold over 16 million copies. Visit her online at ValMcDermid.com.

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    Reviews for The Grave Tattoo

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    • 4/5
      Clever mix of themes - concise style and all in all a good read
    • 4/5
      Stand alone with a Mutiny on the Bounty connection
    • 4/5
      I picked this one up for a couple of quid in a charity shop, having read many of McDermid's other books and enjoyed them. I didn't realise when I picked it up that this book was quite a departure from her usual style. The lack of gore was quite refereshing ;-)Jane Gresham is a university lecturer in English; her speciality is Wordsworth. She lives in London, but grew up in a small village in the Lake District close to where Wordsworth worked. When a body, dead for about 200 years, is found in a peat bog near her home village, she sets up to try and prove her pet theory - that Fletcher Christian returned to England years after the Bounty mutiny, and sought sanctuary with his old fried Wordsworth. She is convinced that Wordsworth wrote an unpublished poem about Christian. There are several other story threads mingled with the main one. I found her ex-boyfriend Jake rather one-dimensional, but enjoyed reading about Tenille, the black teenager from Jane's London block of flats. Interspersed with the current day story are accounts from Christian himself of the period before, during & after the mutiny. These I lost interest in as the novel went on - I found myself skipping them in my eagerness to see how the plot progressed. There's a good twist at the end which I didn't see coming, but I felt the loose ends were a little too quickly wound up.All in all, a good read. Took a little while to get going, but I stormed through the second half.
    • 4/5
      The book has a fascinating premise based on a possible real life scenario - what if Fletcher Christian came back to England and told his cousin William Wordsworth about his life, and what if Wordsworth wrote his story? I found the mystery compelling and the story interesting, but it did drag a bit in the middle.
    • 2/5
      The Grave Tattoo. Val McDermid. 2008. I read one of the author’s Tony Hill novels several years ago and really enjoyed it. This one was not as good as I remember the other novel being. Locals in the Lake District of England have long believed that Fletcher Christian, who led the mutiny on the “Bounty,” secretly returned to his home in the district. They also believe that his friend, William Wordsworth wrote a narrative poem describing Christian’s story of the mutiny. The poem was never published for obvious reasons. When a “bog man” is discovered in the Lake District, Jane Gresham, a Wordsworth scholar thinks there is a good possibilitythat the body could be that of Fletcher Christian. She returns to her home also in the Lake District to try to find the poem and/or proof that Wordsworth wrote it. Her ex-lover and others want to find the poem before Jane. When people who may have connections with Wordsworth are killed, Jane is accused of murder. Then book is not all that suspenseful and I suspect that other readers will figure who the villain is as I did.
    • 4/5
      After a disappointing first try with McDermid's fiction, I was delightfully surprised with this novel. Intelligent, well-researched and creative, it beautifully combines history, myth, fiction, adventure and suspense. The ending was a little over the top (as endings tend to be to create that ultimate twist) but nothing to distract from the overall effect. A great summer read.
    • 3/5
      This is a different sort of story and for most of it it was less a crime story, that I was expecting, then a mystery treasure hunt story. There were parts of this I didn't like and it's hard to explain why, it just didn't grab me. Though the ending did get a bit better, more exciting and intense after a long drawn out hunt.
    • 5/5
      It had some mixed reviews on Amazon.co.uk, so I thought I'd make my own mind up. A Brilliant Phycological Thriller! set in the Lake District. Involving murder that takes place in the present day, but has connections to the past in Fletcher Christian & William Wordsworth. It kept me hooked & guessing right till the end. It's the first of Val McDermid's books I've read & it definately won't be the last.
    • 4/5
      Clever working of background about the Mutiny of the Bounty and Fletcher Christian into a modern day mystery of an old body suddenly revealed in the Lake District. A Wordsworth scholar believes that there is a lost story of Fletcher Christian as told to Wordsworth and her hunt for it arouses the interest of others less scrupulous. Good plotting and characters, although I did guess the identify of one of those plotting, but it didn't spoil the story for me.