The night after her father’s funeral, Claire meets Lucas in a bar. Lucas doesn’t know it, but it’s not a chance meeting. One thoughtless mistyped email has put him in the crosshairs of an extremely put-out serial killer. But before they make eye contact, before Claire lets him buy her a drink—even before she takes him home and carves him up into little pieces—something about that night is very wrong. Because someone is watching Claire. Someone who is about to discover her murderous little hobby.

The thing is, it’s not sensible to tangle with a part-time serial killer, even one who is distracted by attending a weekly bereavement support group and trying to get her art career off the ground. Will Claire finish off her blackmailer before her pursuer reveals all? Let the games begin . . .

IN A NUTSHELL
‘You’d Look Better As A Ghost‘ was dark, compelling, honest and surprising. It took me inside the head of Claire, a lifelong serial killer. It showed her as being neurodivergent in a way that allows, even invites her to kill. This is a brutal, angry, violent, disturbingly real story. I didn’t find it comic but I did find it believable. Two things made the book an exceptional read: that Claire was struggling to cope with her grief for her recently deceased father and the vivid, disturbing memories of her childhood with her vicious mother. They moved my perception of Claire from am amoral monster to a real person with strong emotions

Claire is a lifelong serial killer. She’s low on empathy and has had to work on her insight in order to pass as an ‘ordinary person‘. Claire experiences most ‘ordinary people’ as odd and unattractive but she tolerates them, except for the ones who cross a line and do things that trigger her need to kill. Those ‘ordinary people’ she sees as ghosts, even before she’s killed them.

When we first meet Claire, she’s in the grip of a new experience: deep, almost overwhelming grief over the death of her father. For me, Claire’s grief transformed her from a weird-but-fun-to-watch psychopath into a much more complex, believable person, Still not someone easy to relate to, the lens Claire sees the world and grief through isn’t one most of us share, but someone who makes sense as something more than an aberrant psyche. 

Two things surprised me about the plot. The first was that, despite being a resourceful, efficient killer, Claire was often in jeopardy as unexpected events upended her plans, forcing her to improvise and take risks. I was surprised that not everything went her but I was even more surprised that I found myself hoping that her improvisations would work. The second unexpected thing was the flashbacks to the appalling way that Claire was treated by her mother on her birthdays from six years old onwards. These were hard to take, both because of her mother’s cruelty and because of Claire’s reaction to it. I thought the flashbacks were a brilliant addition to the story. They made present-day Claire easier to understand without in any way trying to excuse or normalise her behaviour.

‘You’d Look Better As A Ghost‘ is promoted as a ‘darkly comic thriller‘. I didn’t think there was anything comic about it. I thought it was a brutal, angry, violent and disturbingly real story. Describing this as a comedy seems like a way of distancing the reader from the raw emotions in the book: rage, grief, pain. the hunger to kill. If this book were about a man doing what Claire is doing, no one would think it was funny. Perhaps it’s a form of misogyny that Hannibal Lecter is seen as a scary monster but Claire gets labelled as quirky and comic

From the writing, you’d never guess that this was a debut novel. The dialogue is spot on. The prose flows, the plot is structured to maximise the tension and the flashbacks are perfectly integrated into the narrative. I recommend the audiobook version of the novel. Imogen Church gave a great performance

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