| | Grave Tattoo |  | Author: Val Mcdermid
Publisher: HARPER COLLINS 0 PUB
Category: Book
Buy New: $24.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  29 reviews
Sales Rank: 4270648
Media: Hardcover
ISBN: 0002008238
EAN: 9780002008235
ASIN: 0002008238
Publication Date: February 1, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Tradepaper Edition; NOT HARDCOVER/NOT SIGNED; Tradepaper; New.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 24 more reviews...
 A bit of a departure February 7, 2007
21 out of 21 found this review helpful
Val McDermid is an excellent writer, one of my favorites in the gritty mystery genre, so I did not hesitate to pick up The Grave Tattoo. This new offering is also a kind of detective story, with some truly nasty goings-on but involves more painstaking scholastic research than typical sleuthing. It reminds me of the line in "DaVinci Code" where Robert's reaction to being chased is "I need a library", one of my favorite quotes. In Tattoo, McDermid deftly combines history, forensics, suspense, literature, and danger into another compelling, atmospheric murder mystery. Both male and female characters are skillfully drawn in 3 dimensions, and the plot with its tantalizing backstory inexorably draws the reader in and won't let go. Definitely not a cosy or a romance, Tattoo should appeal to readers who enjoy a bit of intellectual exercise embedded within their entertainment.
 `Now it was her job to make him come alive all over again.' March 18, 2008
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
A bizarrely tattooed body is discovered in the UK Lake District. There are persistent rumours that Fletcher Christian secretly returned from his exile to Pitcairn Island and was harboured by William Wordsworth, a childhood friend, who turned his tale into an epic poem. Because the manuscript has remained hidden, there is no conclusive proof of its existence. Can the body be that of Fletcher Christian? Is the manuscript still extant? Who holds the key to the past? Wordsworth Scholar Jane Gresham would love to find the manuscript, as would many others and not all are as scrupulous.
Peopled with interesting characters, the research through the past in combination with some fast action in the present provides the potential ingredients for a good mystery. This book involves a number of different subplots, some of which are more satisfying than others. Overall, the total package worked well for me, and I enjoyed the read.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
not my cup of tea March 1, 2007
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
I have read Val McDermid before - Tattoo had a great premise - a search for a lost Wordsworth epic work about Fletcher Christian from Bounty fame. Christian, who was smuggled back to England, was friends with Wordsworth. Christian wanted to tell someone the real story - that couldn't be published in his lifetime without reprisals for both men - In present day, enter a Wordsworth scholar, a young black girl from the projects, and a trek to Jane's (the scholar) family home to find the mysterious manuscript and see if a man's body found well preserved in a bog that has south seas tattoos could be Christian - If only the characters and actions in this book matched the great premise and promise. Yes, there is action, but the writing is so flatline, it does not get you involved.
The inside cover of Tattoo promises this is on par with Dante Club, and Historian - that is a definite NO WAY.
I am sorry the book didn't connect - there is information on Wordsworth and Christian, and I am a fan of William Wordsworth, but it is not enough. There is no character development, no one to cheer for. The only beauty came from the bits and pieces of Wordworth's manuscript, but that's only a blurb before every chapter. The last pages were interesting, but it was too late.
A whale of a story February 14, 2007
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Why does the Bounty story fascinate us so? (Please don't say it's the sight of Mel Gibson in tight trousers and a pigtail.) From three movie versions to the celebrated Nordhoff and Hall trilogy, from contemporary 18th-century accounts to recent historiography, the tale of mutiny, survival and exile has been told and retold. In part I think it's the age-old drama of rebellion against tyranny: heroic Fletcher Christian confronting evil Captain Bligh, setting his former commander afloat in an open boat to make his way back to England, then leading the crew to a refuge on the obscure shores of Pitcairn Island. Modern interpretations, however, have corrected the romantic might versus right version with an awareness of class difference and historical context --- portraying Bligh not as a sadist but as a brilliant navigator whose leadership style was no more authoritarian than any other captain in Her Majesty's Navy at the time.
In THE GRAVE TATTOO we get yet another angle, albeit purely speculative, on the Bounty. Val McDermid, best known for her gritty, urban psychological thrillers, heads this time into historical/literary-mystery territory, playing with the hypothesis that Christian, who is understood to have been murdered a few years after reaching Pitcairn, didn't die. Instead, he escaped back to England, where he contacted the poet William Wordsworth (with whom he had gone to school) and told him the true story of the mutiny and its aftermath --- which became the basis for a lost epic poem.
McDermid's protagonist is young, pretty Wordsworth specialist Jane Gresham. When a reasonably intact body with tattoos from the South Sea Islands is found in a bog in the Lake Country, Jane realizes that it could be Fletcher Christian. Soon she is hot on the trail of the missing manuscript, tracing it to descendants of Wordsworth's housemaid, who attended his deathbed. When elderly members of that family start dying too frequently and conveniently, THE GRAVE TATTOO takes on some of the attributes of a more standard whodunit.
McDermid's technique is to alternate the modern tale with excerpts from the story Fletcher Christian told Wordsworth (she doesn't attempt a reconstruction of the lost poem) --- a double-barreled narrative device I've encountered quite a lot lately and of which I'm becoming a bit weary. She mixes in plenty of subplots and subsidiary characters, too: a broken romance for Jane; sibling rivalry between Jane and her petulant teacher brother; the trials of Jane's protege, Tenille, a 13-year-old mixed-race girl with a taste for Romantic poetry (the freshest voice in the book); the investigations of a forensic anthropologist named River Wilde (!) and her policeman boyfriend. There is also a good deal of rhapsodizing about the beauties of the Lake Country, where Jane spent her childhood, but the language often sounds like that of a travel brochure.
Unfortunately, that isn't the only sense in which this novel is predictable. McDermid has a couple of interesting (psychosexual) twists on what "really" happened, but I don't think THE GRAVE TATTOO succeeds either as a mystery (I guessed the villain way before the end) or a literary-historical puzzle. Background data about Wordsworth and the Bounty is introduced mechanically, via various handy stock characters, and clues turn up all too fortuitously; it's like a sketch for a novel rather than the real thing.
This is very odd, since I have found all of McDermid's work up until now absolutely riveting (notably her Carol Jordan/Tony Hill series, one of which I reviewed for this website a couple of years ago), with fiendishly clever plots and credible, complex characters. I'm all for authors reinventing themselves --- it's a shame to get stuck in a formula, no matter how successful --- but for me this experiment just didn't work.
I read THE GRAVE TATTOO while staying, appropriately, on an island, the sound of the sea crashing in the background and the smell of salt in the air. Probably we will never know which version of the mutiny --- because, Rashomon-like, there are several --- is true. When men and masters are trapped on a sailing ship, miles from anywhere, with tensions building and rage exploding, anything can happen and, evidently, did. It's still a whale of a story.
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
 Disappointing. March 7, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
I have read almost all of Val McDermids books so I was very excited to see this new one in the bookstore. However the story never really takes off, the characterization is weak and does not develop and the story is pretty uninteresting.
The climax is reasonably well done but if one doesn't care about the characters who really cares?
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