The Grave Tattoo
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
When torrential summer rains uncover a bizarrely tattooed body on a hillside in England’s Lake District, locals are convinced it is the corpse of Fletcher Christian, infamous mutineer on the Bounty. Though history records that Christian died in a massacre on Pitcairn Island, Lakelanders have long maintained that he returned home—where his old friend and schoolmate, William Wordsworth, risked facing the gallows by harbouring the fugitive. It was rumoured that the poet had written an epic verse recounting Christian’s version of events, only to hide it away for fear its publication would result in his arrest. For the Wordsworth scholar Jane Gresham, the missing manuscript—if indeed it ever existed—is the ultimate prize. But on her trail is someone with a more than academic interest in the 200-year-old text, someone who will kill to get their hands on a bounty worth millions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An intriguing, 200-year-old mystery propels this multilayered stand-alone from British author McDermid set in England's Lake District. Scholar Jane Gresham pursues her theory that HMS Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian returned secretly from exile to his homeland in the late 18th century. A shriveled body found in a bog seems to bear resemblance to this dashing hero, right down to the South Sea tattoos that blacken his buttocks. Jane searches relentlessly for a lost manuscript by the poet Wordsworth that relates Christian's tale in tantalizing excerpts between chapters. Various subplots complicate her quest, including a fraught friendship with precocious 13-year-old Tenille, a lonely, mixed-race girl who also loves Romantic poetry. With a feminist, socially conscious spin, McDermid (The Distant Echo) vividly contrasts marginal subsistence in London's dismal Marshpool neighborhood with the Lake District's bucolic lifestyle. Boasting blurbs from such notable authors as Harlan Coben, Tess Gerritsen and Joseph Finder, this could be McDermid's break-out book. 100,000 printing; author tour.
