Starsky and ....Wainwright??
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This was my first McDermid book and I'm a bit undecided about how good or bad it was. It was certainly not a page turning thriller, more "nice cup of tea" than "large JD and Coke".
A strangely tattooed but well preserved body is discovered in the Lake District. Jane Gresham, college lecturer, Wordsworth expert and part time barmaid is intrigued enough to return to her Lakeland hometown to investigate further. Could the legend be true? Did Fletcher Christian, leader of the Mutiny on the Bounty, return to England to tell his tale to trusted school friend William Wordsworth ? If so, did the manuscript exist and who had it? Whilst tracing Wordsworth's descendants, one too many of them die of "natural causes" for her liking and she is not alone in the hunt for the fabled document....
Mc Dermid's plot simmers nicely but never really comes to the boil as the blurb would have us believe. I was quite interested to see the outcome, but really nowhere near the edge of my seat. Too many clichéd and under-developed characters were bought in and out. The police love scene was weak and pointless. Tennille grated especially, the "street" black kid with a love of poetry was an obvious (and commendable) attempt to paint black youth in a positive light but it came across as patronising and unrealistic. Whilst McDermid wanted to portray her as an intelligent and responsible kid, she had no problems in sending her to burgle houses, thus reverting to stereotype. All Jane's gay friends were nice and promiscuous too. For an author of several books, this came across as very naive.
I did enjoy the Fletcher Christian stories that preceded each chapter, giving us a good insight into what "really" happened on the bounty and on Pitcairn.
On the strength of this , I would give McDermid books another try (the other are better rated for a start) but this one just gets 3 stars overall from me as the ending had quite a good twist. It would probably work better as a TV movie, what with the current obsession for forensic science on our screens and all.
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Don't understand the low scoring!
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I thought this was a real page turner, despite not being really interested in the whole Wordsworth / Mutiny theory!
One of Val's best!
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Preposterous premise and surprisingly poor execution
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As someone who enjoys McDermid's well plotted and deftly executed thrillers, I found this to be well below her usual standards.
A large part of the problem is that the book requires you to buy into a preposterous premise, i.e. that Fletcher Christian was not a villainous mutineer, but rather an honourable man forced to confront Bligh and who later used an attempt on his life to fake his death and return to England, where he sought William Wordsworth's help in rehabilitating his image by telling the true story in an epic poem. For me, this was very difficult to take seriously, made harder by McDermid's surprisingly poor argument (essentially a mixture of local Cumbrian legend, which she fleshes out with a fictional account of Christian's story) and execution. Had she done more to expand Christian's story beyond interspersing one or two pages of his tale into the main narrative, I might have been able to overcome my issues, but as it was, I felt there was too little of Christian on the page for me to believe in.
The main plot of the story revolves around Wordsworth scholar Jane's attempts to track down Wordsworth's poem based on Christian's account. Aided by fellow Wordsworth scholar, Dan, she seeks to track down descendents of Wordsworth's maid, Dorcas, who she believes took the manuscript. Interspersed with this are the misadventures of Jane's 13 year old neighbour, Tenille, a council estate girl who grasps the essence of poetry and who is fleeing the police after the murder of her aunt's boyfriend and forensic anthopologist River's attempts to work out the identity of a mysterious 'bog body' that's emerged near Jane's home village.
For me, the Tenille plot strand was easily the weakest - I simply didn't buy into the idea of a 13 year old girl loving poetry and Wordsworth as she is supposed to, especially given that she skips school. I felt that McDermid strained to give her relevance, evidenced by the cliches she brings out on council estate life incuding the skeezy boyfriend of Tenille's aunt and her gangland boss father. It was particularly disappointing that Tenille's supposed intelligence and practicality leaves her when McDermid has to use her to move the plot along (e.g. burglarising houses to try and find the poem, not removing her fingerprints from a gun).
Jane herself is a bland character, defined by her exposition of the plot and her blinkered view of the world around her. I found it difficult to believe in her contrived naivety, particularly in her dealings with the Hammer, although thankfully McDermid doesn't have her fall into cliche in her dealings with ex-boyfriend, Jake.
The ending to the book felt very rushed, particularly in the denouement as to the murderer's identity. I really wish that I'd caught more of a sense of the murderer's motivation earlier on, which may have helped me buy into why they did it.
Where McDermid does do well is with her ability to pace the story so that it gallops along at a breakneck speed. Indeed, this was its only redeemable feature.
Whilst McDermid's worst is still better than what many other thriller writers produce, this really isn't her best work and I would steer people towards her Wire in the Blood series before reading this.
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Not entirely sure about this book.
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I don't know how many people know about Fletcher Cristian and the mutiny on the Bounty, but I'm inclined to argue that it's famous enough in England to make Blyth the fifth or sixth most famous naval captain in English history (behind Scott, Cook, Wellington, Shackleton and Nelson).
In this book, McDermid introduces a new central character, Jane Gresham. Gresham is a Wordsworth scholar who believes that Fletcher Christian made it back to the UK after the mutiny and told his friend William Wordsworth about Blyth 'liking men.' In response to this, she believes that Wordsworth wrote a poem about Blyth that she wants to be the first to find.
When a body she believes to be Christian's turns up in the Lake District, she sets off to investigate the body and prove her theory correct.
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.
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Long, long, long....
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I haven't read many of Val McDermid's recent books, so didn't have many expectations of what this book should be like. The blurb sounded intriguing, with the possibility of textured storytelling.
To my surprise, things turned out a little differently and truthfully, if I had been reading this without knowing who the author was, I would have suspected it was a first novel. I realise that other readers have found this book to be worth five stars, but I find it difficult to understand why. Perhaps it is in our individual reaction to the characters and I found the main character to be very difficult to believe in as a person who could possibly exist outside the requirements of the plot of this novel. The few other McDermid books that I have read had strong (and flawed) female characters; sadly this book does not.
I also found the plot to be rather cliched and some of the other characterisations to be a little overdone. These are flaws which can be easily overlooked if the writing and storytelling is well paced and gripping. Unfortunately I found that the whole thing moved very slowly.
It was a long read, but I persevered only to find that when revealed, the murderer proved to be someone so unexpected that it would have made me grind my teeth, had I not been so pleased to finally get to the end.
In the end we shouldn't depend on others to tell us what to think of a book. Another reader could thoroughly enjoy this book so go for it. My one recommendation would be don't spend a lot of money on it just in case...
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