Val McDermid is the winner of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger Award 2010, which honours outstanding achievement in the field of crime writing.
Shortlisted for the Crime Thriller of the Year Award at the Galaxy British Book Awards 2008.
Val McDermid's latest riveting crime thriller, The Grave Tattoo is very different to much of her previous work; it is no less riveting but it has a truly huge breadth and depth of canvas, which she has pulled off with great aplomb. Fletcher Christian was the man responsible for seizing command of the Bounty from Bligh in 1789 and his death on Pitcairn island has never been truly confirmed and did he in fact die in his beloved Lake District? Christian was distantly related to William Wordsworth, and was an old school friend of the poet and this forms the basis for a superb psychological thriller in which a present-day murder and a Wordsworth manuscript have their routes in the eighteenth century and the mutiny. When a tattooed body is found half-preserved in the brackish water of a peat bog local Wordsworth scholar Jane Gresham jumps at the chance to investigate. We feel The Grave Tattoo will be thoroughly enjoyed by her existing fan base but also be enjoyed equally by those who thrive on finding clues as well weaving historical investigative work with the present.
When torrential summer rains uncover a bizarrely tattooed body on a Lake District hillside, old wives' tales also come swirling to the surface. For centuries Lakelanders have whispered that Fletcher Christian staged the massacre on Pitcairn so that he could return home. 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 harbouring a fugitive.
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. But as she pursues each new lead, death follows hard on her heels. Suddenly Jane is at the heart of a 200-year-old mystery that still has the power to put lives on the line. Against the dramatic backdrop of England's Lake District a drama of life and death plays out, its ultimate prize a bounty worth millions.
Val McDermid is a number one bestselling author whose novels have been translated into more than forty languages and have sold over nineteen million copies. She has won many awards, including the CWA Gold Dagger, the LA Times Book of the Year Award and the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for outstanding achievement. Val writes full-time and divides her time between Edinburgh and East Neuk of Fife.
