The Grave Tattoo

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McDermid’s fiendishly clever eighth novel featuring forensic psychologist Tony Hill and detective Carol Jordan (after The Retribution) finds the two partners on the outs. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

McDermid employs such ingenious, unexpected plot twists that I was left open-mouthed on numerous occasions. As is my wont, I was switching between ebook and audio, and the reading by Julie Maisey was excellent, my only very slight nit-pick being pronunciation of some of the scientific terms following an autopsy. And it kept being repeated and laboured over by more and more characters having to explain it to one another! This in turn sets up the prospect of a undiscovered Wordsworth manuscript that could never have been revealed in the poet’s lifetime. The main character is obsessed with finding a manuscript for the whole book, but then when she finds out where it is, she's too tired to go get it, even thought she knows someone else is looking for it and killing people to get it?Oh, and as for the idea of a connection between Christian and Wordsworth, it seems that while the families did know each other and the boys were at the same school, there was a six-year age gap which at that time of life likely precludes them having much to do with each other.

Setting a mystery in the epicenter of a war zone challenges the genre conventions, but it doesn’t change the rules. An interesting mix of historical facts and fiction in a contemporary setting based around the premise that a newly unearthed tattooed body in a Lakeland peat bog is the Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian. Even if you stretch the bounds of credibility for artistic licence, he's arresting people on evidence so paper thin you could make a kite out of it.

It’s summer in the Lake District and heavy rain over the fells has uncovered a bizarrely tattooed body. Jane Gresham, native of a small village in the Lake District, is an impoverished graduate scholar specializing in William Wordsworth, a local boy. for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.

Indulgent nonsense, a back story so dull - but obviously not to the author - it kept putting me to sleep. I’ve had a few Val McDermid novels on my bookshelf for a while but The Grave Tattoo is the first one I’ve read, and I must say, I wish I had got to this one sooner. THE GRAVE TATTOO has a very unexpected setting and environment for a crime fiction book than much of the standard offering these days.She believes that the Lakeland poet William Wordsworth, a friend of Christian's, may have sheltered the fugitive and turned his tale into an epic poem – which has since disappeared. Back in Cumbria, the extremely heavy summer rains have unearthed the mummified body of a tattooed sailor in a peat bog. 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. When a body she believes to be Christian's turns up in the Lake District, she sets off to investigate the body and prove her theory correct. In a world where civilization has broken down into “ignorant, simple-minded, violent politics,” this decent man commits the ultimate act of heroism — keeping an open mind.

The Gaelic Books Council (Comhairle nan Leabhraichean) is the lead organisation with responsibility for supporting Scottish Gaelic authors and publishers, and for raising the profile and reach of Scottish Gaelic books in Scotland and internationally. I wasn’t sure whether I was to believe the factual details or enjoy the fictional story I was being told.

This intriguing second novel by the author of Report for Murder again casts lesbian Scottish journalist Lindsay Gordon.