The rains pour into England one summer and disturb a body that had been hidden in a bog in the Lakes District. Everyone calms down when they realize that the body is a couple of hundred years old and not a recent murder. But Jane Gresham, a scholar of William Wordsworth’s poetry, remains intrigued. She has long suspected that Wordsworth had a famous friend: none other than Fletcher Christian, known for starting the historic mutiny on the Bounty. She thinks the body that just bobbed up in the bog might be Fletcher Christian’s remains.

Who cares, you might ask? Jane cares because she and a few other scholars think that Fletcher Christian might have sneaked back to England and told his side of the mutiny to his friend Wordsworth.

Unfortunately for Fletcher Christian, his wronged captain Bligh made it back to England first. Captain Bligh’s side of the story became widespread, and the captain himself became a celebrity due to his heroic survival and phenomenal navigation skills. So, if Fletcher Christian returned to England at all, he would have had to sneak in because mutiny carried a death sentence. He probably would have timed his return with the newly-started Napoleonic War, which would have pushed the mutiny on the Bounty out of the forefront of everyone’s mind, and replaced Captain Bligh with Lord Nelson as the most famous man in England. Ah, the fickleness of stardom!

What does this have to do with Wordsworth and hence Jane, you might ask? Well, if Fletcher Christian returned and told his side of the mutiny to Wordsworth, the poet would not have been able to resist writing it up in a poem even if he and his famously secretive descendents would have hidden the document for centuries. Jane has always suspected that there is a hidden Wordsworth epic on the mutiny on the Bounty, and if she discovers it, she will have made academic history.

What our pure-at-heart heroine doesn’t consider is that such a discovery will also mean a lot of money to whomever gets the rights to such a Wordsworth poem (if it exists). Such thoughts have occurred to Jane’s worthless ex-boyfriend Jake and his new girlfriend Caroline, a rapacious dealer in historic documents. Jake and Caroline have read about the “bog body” discovery in the English newspapers, and then reconstructed Jane’s hypothesis about Christian Fletcher and Wordsworth from Jake’s keen memory of their past conversations.

Soon Jane is headed back to the Lake District where she grew up to question her neighbors and try to track down the descendents of servants who worked for Wordsworth and who might have become the custodian of his old papers. Unbeknownst to her, Jake is hot on her heels. But Jane has enough troubles because her resentful brother, the local headmaster, is getting in her way and on her nerves. Plus, her protégé, a troubled black girl named Tenille, has gotten into trouble with the law and has gone on the run to find Jane. Then, worst of all, the elderly locals of the Lakes District who might have the Wordsworth papers start dying one by one under suspicious circumstances.

McDermid spins a competent mystery with somewhat flat characters. She does, however, leave all the historical stuff indefinite. Did Fletcher Christian really come back to England? Did Wordsworth really write a hidden epic about the mutiny on the Bounty? Well, you’re not going to get the answers from McDermid. The Grave Tattoo can be found on Amazon through this link: The Grave Tattoo