Claire and Sophie aren’t your typical murder investigators . . .
Claire Hendricks is a hapless 30-something true-crime fan working as a freelance medium. When she is Invited to an old university friend’s country pile to provide entertainment for a family party, her best friend Sophie tags along. In fact, Sophie rarely leaves Claire’s side, because she’s been haunting her ever since she was murdered at the age of 17.
When the pair arrive at The Cloisters it’s clear this family is hiding more than just the good china, as Claire realizes someone has recently met an untimely end at the house. Teaming up with the least unbearable members of the Wellington-Forge family—depressive ex-cop Basher and teenage reactionary Alex—Claire and Sophie determine to figure out not just whodunnit, but who they killed, why and when…

IN A NUTSHELL
‘Grave Expectations‘ is a quirky contemporary cosy supernatural mystery that succeeds in being a fun read that takes its characters seriously. I loved the concept of the medium whose ‘spirit guide’ / constant invisible companion is her best friend who died many years ago when they were both teenagers and has been with her ever since. There was some good situational humour, mostly at the expense of posh people, and a low-key murder mystery that kept me entertained. What I liked most was the time spent working through the challenges and rewards of having an invisible dead person as your best friend for over a decade.

The opening of ‘Grave Expectations‘ confidently ploughed its own furrow. The ‘medium in a country house’ setting automatically got me thinking of Golden Age Mysteries or cake-centric cosy mysteries, so making the setting contemporary and having Claire, the medium, and her teenage-when-she-died spirit guide, Sophie, make snarky comments at the expense of their upper-class-but-dull hosts had a discordant edge to it that I enjoyed.

At first, I was carried forward mostly by the novelty of the set-up and the flashes of humour. Claire, Sophie and the grandmother who heads the household were a cool combination that made me smile.

There were a couple of storytelling challenges with slightly clunky workarounds: letting Sophie, who no one but Claire can see or hear, ask questions without having a lot of repetition and fitting in a flashback without an authorial voice. Alice Bell handled them with an authorial shrug and wry smile which worked for me.

I’d expected ‘Grave Expectations’ to be a quirky romp through a cosy mystery where two women, one of whom is dead, use their amateur sleuthing powers to solve the mystery of the body in the library that only they can see. And it was that. But with a few surprises. The setting screams Golden Age Mystery but there was nothing retro about the people in the novel. Much of the humour was at the expense of the strange behaviour of rich posh people and our two amateur sleuths are nothing like any of the women in Christie or Sayers.

The biggest surprise was that much of the book focused on what it would really be like to spend decades with the ghost of your best friend, who nobody but you can see. Especially when that best friend still looks and mostly acts like she’s still seventeen and when your family treats you as if you need therapy and anti-psychotic drugs.

‘Grave Expectations’ was fun as a stand-alone novel but I’d be happy to read a sequel if Alice Bell writes one.