"The Grave Tattoo"
By Val McDermid
St. Martin's Press/Minotaur, $24.95
Val McDermid is known for her hard-bitten, grisly crime novels -- a critic friend describes her "A Place of Execution" as one of the scariest books he's ever read -- but despite its ominous title, "The Grave Tattoo" isn't any such thing. Think of this book as a grown-up version of a Nancy Drew adventure, especially designed for English majors. McDermid's heroine, an intrepid but impoverished Ph.D. named Jane Gresham, is hot on the trail of her pet theory. She thinks that the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth knew the infamous seaman Fletcher Christian (leader of the mutiny on the Bounty). The idea isn't far-fetched: The two men grew up in England's Lake District, went to the same grammar school, and Christian's brother, a lawyer, represented the Wordsworth family in a lawsuit.
What's less plausible is the second part of Jane's theory, which ties into a long-standing Lake District legend that Christian wasn't really killed in a battle on Pitcairn Island, as is generally thought, but actually snuck back to England and hid out near his childhood home. Jane has discovered a vague reference to a suppressed document in a letter Wordsworth's widow wrote to one of their sons, and she's convinced the document is a poem describing the mutiny from Christian's perspective. It was destroyed or (she hopes) hidden in order to conceal the respectable poet's friendship with a notorious felon and fugitive from the law.
What Jane's academic friends call her "fantasy" gains some traction when an early 19th-century corpse turns up in a peat bog not far from her hometown. The chemicals in the bog can preserve flesh for years, and this body still has its skin -- complete with South Sea Island-style tattoos. Jane hies it home from London, where she lives in a bleak housing project and mentors Tenille, a 13-year-old black girl with a headful of dreadlocks and a precocious love of Romantic poetry. Several other players -- a sleazy ex-boyfriend, a gay pal and, eventually, Tenille herself -- follow suit. Everyone, including Jane's resentful, envious schoolteacher brother and a shadowy, possibly homicidal individual whose identity won't be revealed until the book's final pages, launches into a search for the lost manuscript.
Granted, there's not much Wordsworthian lore in "The Grave Tattoo," but then he wasn't a very colorful character, and to judge by McDermid's attempts to ventriloquize Fletcher Christian in some passages, historical verisimilitude isn't her forte. Moody Lake District scenery and the gossipy, provincial society of its long-term residents provide most of the novel's texture. The result is a sort of small-town free-for-all, with all the various sleuths rushing to be the first to sweet-talk this or that elderly local into handing over a half-forgotten cache of family papers. "A Grave Tattoo" is not so much gripping as beguiling, an amiable, old-fashioned detective yarn with enough modern touches to keep a reader on her toes and the perfect diversion for long, lazy afternoons on the porch.
-- Laura Miller
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