I first heard of Val McDermid’s novel The Grave Tattoo in a 2007 issue of Bookmarks, added it to my wishlist, and then promptly forgot about it. Then I was doing some reshelving at the library and came across a copy of it in our stacks. The cover art itself was enough to pique my interest once again.

Jane Gresham is a young Wordsworth scholar whose pet theory is that Fletcher Christian (of the mutiny on the Bounty fame) returned to his native Lake District and told his story to a childhood friend, William Wordsworth, who wrote it all down in an epic poem that has remain hidden for two centuries. This theory becomes a bit more plausible and a lot more intriguing when a preserved body is uncovered in an area peat bog, complete with South Sea-style tattoos. Suddenly Jane isn’t the only one interested in the possibility of this long-lost poem, and so begins a story that has as many subplots as possible villains. But McDermid ties the tangents nicely together, and even though I rightly suspected who the real villain was about halfway through, it was still very much an enjoyable mystery with a literary twist.