Overall, an enjoyable if somewhat lengthy story that I think might have benefitted by a little editorial pruning and stepping up of some pacing. Scholar and native Lakelander Jane Gresham feels compelled to finally discover the truth about the myths and buried secrets rooted in her hometown. I was a bit sceptical about this at first, finding the little Wordsworth insertions a bit distracting. And she doesn’t know that one of the people competing with her for the prize doesn’t mind killing to get it.

When Michelle Gibson reports her father, Mick Prentice, missing at the start of McDermid's intricate but underwhelming stand-alone psychological thriller, Det.com, the Sell on Etsy app, and the Etsy app, as well as the electricity that powers Etsy’s global offices and employees working remotely from home in the US. Obviously Dorcas Mason's past was a secret history as far as her family was concerned, but someone, somewhere has a little treasure trove whose contents have never been thoroughly explored. As is my wont, I was switching between ebook and audio, and the reading by Julie Maisey was excellent, my only very slight nit-pick being pronunciation of some of the scientific terms following an autopsy. Although the book started with the weather (a pet peeve of mine), the weather was vital to the plot.

Jane Gresham is a postdoc who is an expert on William Wordsworth, and she grew up in the Lake District where Wordsworth lived and wrote.A superb psychological thriller in which present-day murder has its roots in the eighteenth century and the mutiny on the Bounty. The additional story of Jane's friendship and growing love for a young 13 year old black girl, Tenille Cole (her neighbour in Marshpool, one of London's rundown public housing projects), rounds out the story nicely, adds a tinge of modern day reality, lifts the tale out of the somewhat stuffy world of pure academia and gives The Grave Tattoo overall a somewhat more US-centric thriller flavour. This is probably the weakest Val McDermid book that I've read, save for her more deliberately pulpy novels about plucky journalists and private investigators flouting the law to get results (heck, I'd probably read Kate Brannigan again in a second).

Even when the history is only partially based on fact, it is a well known enough story that most would recognize the bones of it and its possible importance to the unveiling of even new facets of this past that makes it so much fun. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH).

It's a daft story, but it rattles along at a fair old whack and if you like your thrillers slightly different, you'll probably admit that storyline is as odd as you've read in a while. Suddenly Jane is at the heart of a 200-year-old mystery that still has the power to put lives on the line. Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. This book was perhaps longer than it needed to be, but the narrative did keep flowing in typical McDermid fashion. Easy to see why so many, both scholars and rogues, would be interested in finding and perhaps even kill to get their hands on these yellowing parchments.

Her novels have won international acclaim and a number of prestigious awards, including the Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year, the Anthony Award for best novel, and the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year Award.University professor and scholar Jane Gresham goes to the Lake District to explore a rumored Wordsworth manuscript containing a poem which may be worth millions. Jane couldn’t remember a time when Langmere Force hadn’t mesmerised her, taking her out of what ever ailed her and making her feel healed.