The Grave Tattoo by Val McDermid. Edgy, tense, compelling.
A 200-year-old body appears when a peat bog in England’s Lake District dries up. There is much speculation as to who the man covered with South Seas tattoos was and how he ended up there.
Wordsworth scholar Jane Grisham is convinced that he was Fletcher Christian, famed HMS Bounty mutineer, who somehow managed to escape from Pitcairn Island and make his way back to England.
Christian and Wordsworth were schoolmates, and Jane is convinced that Wordsworth would have been compelled to elicit his story and record it, perhaps even render it into verse.
If so, what had become of the manuscript?
This book has already won the Portico Prize for Fiction, a prize is awarded by the Portico Library in Manchester to a book about the North West of England or set primarily in that region.
PW says “… this could be McDermid’s break-out book.”
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