Jane has been living a hand-to-mouth existence in a council flat on the rundown Marshpool Farm Estate in London, a known habituÃ© for drug dealers, pimps and petty criminals, so she sees the discovery of this body as an opportunity to raise herself out of semi-poverty and perhaps prove her long-held theory that indeed Fletcher did return to England and chose to tell his version of events to his old school friend.

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. This legend and the fact that Christian was distantly related to William Wordsworth, he was even an old school friend of the poet, forms the basis for Val McDermid's latest riveting crime thriller, The Grave Tattoo. Christian ended up living on Pitcairn Island, where he later died along with the other mutineers.īut did Christian really die or was his murder faked? Rumors have persisited for a hundred years that he had indeed left the Island, and that he eventually made it all the way back to England, where he lived out the rest of his life in his birthplace, hidden from justice by his family and friends, safely ensconced in the Cumbria, Lake District area of England. Reviewįletcher Chistian (1764 - 1793) was a Master's Mate on board the Bounty during William Bligh's fateful voyage to Tahiti for breadfruit plants and it was Fletcher Christian who seized command of the Bounty from Bligh on April 28th 1789 claiming the crew were suffering from inhuman treatment. Against the dramatic backdrop of England's Lake District a drama of life and death plays out, its ultimate prize a bounty worth millions. Suddenly Jane is at the heart of a 200-year-old mystery that still has the power to put lives on the line. But as she pursues each new lead, death follows hard on her heels. Wordsworth specialist Jane Gresham, herself a native of the Lake District, feels compelled to discover once and for all whether the manuscript ever existed-and whether it still exists today. And there, he told his story to an old friend and schoolmate, William Wordsworth, who turned it into a long narrative poem-a poem that remained hidden lest it expose Wordsworth to the gallows for harboring a fugitive. For centuries, Lakelanders have whispered that Fletcher Christian staged the massacre on Pitcairn so that he could return home. Bounty. After torrential summer rains uncover a bizarrely tattooed body on a Lake District hillside, long discarded old wives' tales takes on a chilling new plausibility.

In a novel reminiscent of The Rule of Four, The Dante Club and The Historian, suspense master McDermid spins a psychological thriller in which a present-day murder has its roots in the eighteenth century and the mutiny on the H.M.S.

The Grave Tattoo by Val McDermid