Book Club participants who enjoyed Val McDermid’s The Grave Tattoo will be interested to hear that it has been longlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award (2008). Val was the winner of this award in 2006 for The Torment of Others. This year her fellow nominees include Alexander McCall Smith, Stef Penny and Christopher Brookmyre. You can vote for The Grave Tattoo over at Waterstones.
The winner will be announced on 17 July at the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate. I went to the festival a few years ago and had a fab time. The Swan Hotel in Harrogate was where Agatha Christie holed up during her infamous disappearance in 1926. After a country-wide search involving over a thousand police officers, Christie was spotted having tea on the terrace of the spa hotel. She claimed she had lost her memory after a car accident, but speculation was rife that it was just a publicity stunt or, as the more sympathetic would have it, a desperate act of a desperately sad woman.
