The discovery of a man’s skeleton atop an Edinburgh building slated for demolition kick-starts Diamond Dagger Award–winner McDermid’s hit-or-miss follow-up to 2008’s A Darker Domain. 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. While Jane's investigation becomes ever more convoluted in a developing series of clues, local forensic anthropologist Dr. The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs.

An intriguing, 200-year-old mystery propels this multilayered stand-alone from British author McDermid set in England's Lake District. There was some part that included a forensic investigation, but this was in connection with the mystery of a body found in a peat bog, not in connection with any of the crimes. 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. 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.Jane, a Wordsworth scholar finds evidence that such a poem might exist and that it was entrusted to a family servant and may have been lost or perhaps passed down through her family who might still have the original manuscript. It's December 1963 and teenage girls all over Britain are swooning to the Beatles' ""I Want to Hold Your Hand. And there he told his story to an old friend and schoolmate, William Wordsworth, who turned it into a long narrative poem. 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 in turn sets up the prospect of a undiscovered Wordsworth manuscript that could never have been revealed in the poet’s lifetime. With a feminist, socially conscious spin, McDermid vividly contrasts marginal subsistence in London’s dismal Marshpool neighbourhood with the Lake District’s bucolic lifestyle…this could be McDermid’s breakout book.

When a tattooed body is found half preserved in the brackish water of a peat bog just outside of Fellhead, local Wordsworth scholar Jane Gresham jumps at the chance to investigate. Of course, if the poem had been published in Wordsworth's lifetime, Christian would have been apprehended and summarily hanged. McDermid provides enough violence to add real urgency to her intriguing premise…the novel’s scholarship is exciting on it’s own terms and entirely appropriate for a district so wildly beautiful that it attracts both poets and pirates. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Set in Manchester, England, which its natives claim as the home of rock 'n' roll, the forthright and unpretentious sleuth introduced in this fast-paced story is sure to win readers' hearts.

Val McDermid needs no introduction, but The Grave Tattoo is a departure for her, centring on a lost Wordsworth manuscript. It is difficult to find words to capture the masterful achievement that is Val McDermid’s THE GRAVE TATTOO.Aside from the 11 days or so that are listed here, I've tried on-and-off to read this book for several years. She is also convinced there is a lost masterpiece, a poem that Wordsworth wrote about the legend of what happened to his notorious friend.

McDermid] shows her extraordinary range as the story weaves between Wordsworth’s, “notes,” the rarefied atmosphere of academia, and the gritty reality of underclass London.Jack Liffey, the Los Angeles private eye in John Shannon’s broad-shouldered novels, is one of those stalwart souls. I really enjoyed how the two mysteries, the one from 200 years ago and the one unfolding as we read, played out. Jane (like Christian, a native of Fellhead) hopes to prove the local legend that he escaped from Pitcairn Island and made his way back to England, also validating her own theory that he confided the true story of his ill-fated adventures to his onetime schoolmate, William Wordsworth.