The Grave Tattoo

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The suspects were fairly introduced to the reader, although they were a few over obvious attempts at portraying sinister actions which just didn't quite seem to work, plus it seemed that some of the supporting character roles were too detailed in some places and too sketchy in others. The police are looking for Tenille and to add to Jane's problems, her ex-boyfriend, now Historical Document Dealer, is stalking Jane through the Lake District trying to get a lead on the important and valuable documents from Wordsworth that everyone believes exist. In 2016, Val received the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival and in 2017 received the DIVA Literary Prize for Crime, and was elected a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. While I made it to the end this time, I previously put down another book he authored whose plot caught my attention because I could not connect with the writing. I loved the characters in this stand alone book (book without a sequel) and liked the combo of Tenille and Jane.

This is more of a plot combined with character study that doesn't pay particular attention to one component over the other.Jane couldn’t remember a time when Langmere Force hadn’t mesmerised her, taking her out of what ever ailed her and making her feel healed. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U. Guest artists are also a regular occurrence, allowing the people of Northern Ireland to be tattooed by International artists. All the characters were expertly crafted and their personalities and motivations came across as authentic. Watching friends die and neighbors turn on one another, Omar Yussef decides that “it’s time for me to scream.

And, it's possible that there is an extant poem written by Wordsworth regarding his friend Fletcher. An intriguing, 200-year-old mystery propels this multilayered stand-alone from British author McDermid set in England's Lake District. 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. Jane Gresham is a postdoc who is an expert on William Wordsworth, and she grew up in the Lake District where Wordsworth lived and wrote.Her novels have won international acclaim and a number of prestigious awards, including the Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year, the Anthony Award for best novel, and the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year Award. 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. River Wilde who is in charge of the autopsy procedures for “Pirate Pete” the body in the bog who fits the time period and some of the markings of Fletcher Christian. I was surprised by the ending - perhaps I would have picked up a clue or two if I'd paid more attention in the middle. The ratings/reviews displayed here may not be representative of every listing on this page, or of every review for these listings.

Snippets of a manuscript are provided at the end of the chapters, so we can get to hear the story as it was told to the one who recorded it.The characterisations were, in the main, reasonably detailed and solid, although some of the motivations for actions were tenuous.

The premise involves a story that I've always liked: Fletcher Christian and the mutiny on the Bounty.What she never expected was to find herself at the heart of a 200-year-old mystery that still has the power to put lives on the line. This is all run through with various familial relationships and local colour, building into a fairly satisfying mystery, although some of the decision-points do seem a little contrived and the ultimate conclusion of one of the mysteries somewhat tacked on, perhaps because this is away from the more visceral style that is the majority of McDermid's work. Unlike old friends, who have a way of changing careers, marital status or religious affiliation when you lose touch, series detectives can usually be counted on to stay in town and on the job until they drop.