The Grave Tattoo

This book pleasantly reminded me of A.S. Byatt's Possession, which I loved (and you should go get, if you haven't read it yet.) Like Byatt's book, this book plays on a literary mystery, bringing together the mystery of the mutiny on the bounty with the life of William Wordsworth and a modern-day search for documents that could make or break careers, and be worth a small fortune to the owners. I am an English professor (of American literature, however), so I love this stuff, if it's done well, and this one is.

Sometimes detective fiction seems to approach non-straight characters almost with tongs and a crinkled nose, so I especially like about this book is that gay and lesbian characters are included as a matter of course (although the central character is straight), and they are fully human.

Finally, I don't know where the other reviewer got the idea that this is Christian fiction (must have been a mis-characterization based on the name Christian Fletcher). Obviously, this is not a "Christian" text, thank heavens, and the language is suited to the areas that the people are coming from and the lives they are leading.

(And I suspect Christ hung out with a lot of people whose language was deemed crude--ironically, in fact, St. Augustine rejected Christianity for a long time simply because the Gospels were written in such a crude, street language, not the Classical Greek he was trained to respect. End of sermon!)

Val McDermid writes some great books that I love; this isn't one of them. I give her credit for an imaginative idea...Fletcher Christian in a British village mystery. But it's just boring. I didn't care a whit about the characters and some situations were out of character as well. I really didn't care who the killer was and the ending was ... "oh how convenient."

I don't really recommend it.

The rated category was misleading. This is not a good representation of Christian authorship. I was very disappointed as the content which was filled with ill advised use of crude language. Often times it required turning down/off the volume or skipping ahead to avoid it, destroying the continuity of the story. Had the author kept to the plot and omitted the swearing punctuated through out, I would have rated it between 3-4 stars. This should be reclassified, off the category of Christian mystery.