Scholar Jane Gresham pursues her theory that HMS Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian returned secretly from exile to his homeland in the late 18th century. Suddenly Jane is at the heart of a 200-year-old mystery that still has the power to put lives on the line.Īgainst the dramatic backdrop of England's Lake District a drama of life and death plays out, its ultimate prize a bounty worth millions.Īn intriguing, 200-year-old mystery propels this multilayered stand-alone from British author McDermid set in England's Lake District. But as she pursues each new lead, death follows hard on her heels. 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. 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 harboring a fugitive. For centuries, Lakelanders have whispered that Fletcher Christian staged the massacre on Pitcairn so that he could return home. Bounty.Īfter torrential summer rains uncover a bizarrely tattooed body on a Lake District hillside, long discarded old wives' tales takes on a chilling new plausibility. Augustine rejected Christianity for a long time simply because the Gospels were written in such a crude, street language, not the Classical Greek he was trained to respect.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.

(And I suspect Christ hung out with a lot of people whose language was deemed crude-ironically, in fact, St.

Obviously, this is not a 'Christian' text, thank heavens, and the language is suited to the areas that the people are coming from and the lives they are leading. Finally, I don't know where the other reviewer got the idea that this is Christian fiction (must have been a mis-characterization based on the name Christian Fletcher). Sometimes detective fiction seems to approach non-straight characters almost with tongs and a crinkled nose, so I especially like about this book is that gay and lesbian characters are included as a matter of course (although the central character is straight), and they are fully human. I am an English professor (of American literature, however), so I love this stuff, if it's done well, and this one is. Byatt's Possession, which I loved (and you should go get, if you haven't read it yet.) Like Byatt's book, this book plays on a literary mystery, bringing together the mystery of the mutiny on the bounty with the life of William Wordsworth and a modern-day search for documents that could make or break careers, and be worth a small fortune to the owners.

The Grave Tattoo by Val McDermid