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| The Grave Tattoo | 
 enlarge | Author: Val Mcdermid
Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $7.98 (100%)
New (43) Used (38) from $0.01
Avg. Customer Rating:  29 reviews
Sales Rank: 69466
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 4.2 x 1.4
ISBN: 0312936109
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780312936105
ASIN: 0312936109
Publication Date: April 29, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 26-29 of 29 | | « PREV | | |
 Kathy in St Louis June 27, 2008
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.
 Not Bad, But Not The Best From This Author August 20, 2008
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 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.
Engrossing, But Weak September 14, 2008
This was my 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.
 The mystery that was Fletcher Christian November 2, 2008
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.
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