Book Log: Val McDermid -- The Grave Tattoo

Book 83

A murder victim's corpse is found in the Lake District, and it's an unusual one -- a bog body, but only two centuries old, and decorated with tattoos that indicate the man had been a sailor in the Pacific. Wordsworth scholar Jane Gresham sees a potential link with a Lakeland rumour -- that Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian had not died on Pitcairn Island, but had secretly made his way back to England. And further, that he might have told his story to his old school friend Wordsworth. Jane already has reason to suspect that there is an undiscovered Wordsworth manuscript chronicling Christian's story, but when she goes looking for it, death follows in her wake.

This is a solid doorstopper of a crime novel, but every page is put to good use by McDermid in weaving her story. Enjoyed this a lot.

LibraryThing entry

and the air glittered yesterday

It was icy cold when I got off the train and walked round to the local office yesterday. So much so that as I walked along a path past a beam of sunlight, I saw tiny motes glittering in the beam. Not like ordinary dust motes, but a sudden bright flare of sunlight, refracted through clear crystal. I thought at first that it was very fine snow, even though the sky was a clear blue. Although I also thought of the Vashta Nerada, having watched the Doctor Who story Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead on Friday. And then I wondered if it was not snow, but direct precipitation from the air around me, some freak of the cold weather crystallising out a little moisture in an ice haze too thin to see except where a crystal caught the sunlight at just the right angle.

I was wrong about the snow, and right about the ice haze, as I discovered when I left work yesterday evening. A mist had risen, making the pedestrian avenue I walked along a strange and wondrous place. The mist was thin enough to be able to see for some distance, but thick enough to make everything more than a metre or two away soft and dimmed. The trees and the path underneath them were already white with new frost. The tiny glittering crystals I had seen dancing in a beam of sunlight were now thick in the air, flashing into visibility as I approached each street lamp, filling the air with sparkles of light for a second or two, and then fading from sight as I walked on towards the lamp and the angle between my eye and the light source changed.

And this morning, the mist had cleared and there was a low sun shining out of a clear blue sky -- but the mist had left its sign behind it. Every tree and every lamppost was crusted with a thick layer of those crystals, the trees a tracery of pure white, the verticals of the lampposts showing black with white highlighting every corner and edge. The old-fashioned lampposts were many, not one, but even so I kept feeling as if I'd just stepped through the back of a wardrobe.

I made sure to have my camera with me this morning. There will, I hope, be photos worth posting later.

[Edit on Sunday: the photos of the frost are now on Flickr.]