Grace McGill is an insular, friendless woman, living in Glasgow in her 30s. She has her beloved cat, and she has her own business – deep cleaning the houses of Undiscovereds. People who die alone and stay that way until they are found weeks, sometimes months, later. 
While working in the home of a man named Tommy Agnew, her suspicions are aroused by a hidden photograph and a stack of newspapers, all from the same date over many, many years. 
Grace can’t get the mysterious life and sad death of Tommy Agnew out of her head, and she soon begins an investigation that could cost her her life. The past has stayed buried for many years already, but Grace has never been one to brush things under the carpet….

I went into ‘The Undiscovered Deaths Of Grace McGill’ with no expectations, just the hope of an entertaining mystery novel with a touch of style. I got so much more than that. This was astonishingly good. Beautifully told. It was startlingly original and full of unexpected things that kept changing my understanding of who Grace was and what was going on. Yet it never felt like one of those clever-clever, distorted-into-a-pretzel-shaped-puzzle novels because the emotions in it were deep and familiar and all of the people felt real. I also loved that the stylish title that had drawn me to the book turned out to mean much more than I thought it would.

From the beginning, I fell deeply and easily into this first-person account. I knew there was something off about Grace and that it wasn’t something small but I also found myself going “I do that’” or “I feel that way too” when she described how she dealt with people face-to-face, something she does best when she’s pretending to be someone else. Instead of going “Aha!” (does anyone say that in real life?) “Grace is an unreliable narrator.” I continued to think a Grace a real person, slightly out of step with other people.

It was Grace’s interior monologues that initially kept me immersed in this book. They felt so real. Not fully honest perhaps but that’s part of what made them feel authentic. How often are we fully honest with ourselves, even in the privacy of our own heads? I liked that the monologues weren’t the once-fashionable punctuation-free continuous stream-of-consciousness stuff. They were more like hearing my own thoughts – a series of reactions to what I see and what I’m being asked.

Part of what made Grace engaging, as well as showing that she shouldn’t be taken at face value was that during conversations we get Grace’s “I think..” – followed by her honest and often acerbic response to what’s been said, and “I say…” followed by innocuous politenesses. This shows Grace as a woman who edits how she presents herself to the world but doesn’t edit her own thoughts. I got so used to this habit of Grace’s that I was shocked when she finally unleashed herself and made “I think” and “I say” the same. 

The thriller element was ramping up by the middle of the book but my attention stayed mainly on Grace herself rather than the mysteries she was trying to solve. I knew that there was something about her that I was failing to see. Something dark and important that I could feel but not name, I loved that feeling. I felt that whatever it was had to do with WHY Grace does death cleaning and WHY she can’t let go of the mystery she thinks she’s found and WHY she still speaks to her obnoxious, abusive father. I admired C S Robinson’s ability to plant these questions in my head and keep the thriller moving.

Everything accelerated for the last third of the book. It started with a stunning revelation. Not so much a plot twist as an earthquake, a paradigm shift, a complete surprise that, even as it had me shaking my head and going “Wow!” made perfect sense.

I listened to the rest of the book deep into the night because I HAD to know what would happen. The ending was wonderful.  I finished the book not just satisfied with a good story but marvelling at how the ending transformed everything that I read but not really grasped in the first two-thirds of the book. It was masterfully done.

I highly recommend this book, especially the audiobook version. Lauren Lyle’s narration amplified my enjoyment. Click on the Youtube link below to hear a sample.

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