Immensely enjoyable, relentlessly mickey-taking murder mystery with a Randall and Hopkirk Deceased vibe: our incredibly amateur sleuth is also an amateur medium, albeit one who can actually see and speak to dead people, because she's had her murdered best friend at her side since they were 17.

That's actually quite a dark premise and we definitely touch into quite how screwed up Claire is, but it's well balanced with the enjoyable elements. There's also a huge amount of fun with her sidekicks, ex cop Basher (actually Sebastian, lol) and nonbinary sarcasm teen Alex, plus the ludicrous posh family who may have murdered someone.

Great assurance in the writing--hard to believe it's a debut--and marvellous characters make this a highly entertaining comic detective romp. I hope this is a series.british fun-fun-fun ghost ...more52 s Kate O'Shea789 75

This book grew on me the deeper in that I got. At first I thought it was an interesting (but not unique premise) Claire being a young woman whose best friend, Sophie, disappeared at the age of 17 and then reappeared as a spirit. Thus Claire now encumbered with a spirit begins her life as a medium. Sophie is by far the most interesting and funny character in this book. I'd be quite happy to read another book with this crime fighting duo in it.

Claire has been booked by the Wellington-Forge family to act as a medium at their nana's birthday celebrations. However things do not go anywhere near to plan and Claire finds herself being pressganged into discovering what happened at last year's celebrations and why there is an unquiet spirit in the library. Who exactly is the spirit? Why are they hanging around the house and, far more importantly, which one of the Wellington-Forge's committed the murder? Thankfully Claire has Sophie to help otherwise, as Sophie quite rightly puts it, nothing would get detected because Claire is rubbish at it.

The book does seem to meander about a little bit to begin with but before you're halfway through the action picks up. There are some extremely comic scenes which lift the narrative but not too many as to make the book silly. The characters are interesting and Claire does bumbling detective exceptionally well. She certainly falls over more clues than she means to.

As a debut novel it's very good. I will definitely look out for Alice Bell in the future, whether Claire and Sophie are part of it or not.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.30 s Jannelies1,099 92

A nice light mystery with a girl, Claire, and a ghost, Sophie, trying to solve a murder. Claire is a medium with a real gift, which doesn't make her life easier. People are not used to real mediums so Claire has to fight often to prejudice. Plus, she's growing up but Sophie will always be 17 and sometimes it's not easy to communicate with her.
I d the story, the characters and the setting, although in places the book lacked some pace. I compliment Alice Bell on an interesting debut and I hope to read more of her in the future.

Thanks to Netgalley and Atlantic Books for this review copy.light-mystery netgalley-before-202418 s Krutika Puranik701 252

Should maybe listen to my gut next time and abandon a book if I don’t enjoy it.

Grave Expectations came with an interesting premise. Claire Hendricks and her dead friend Sophie come to conduct a seance for a party and get involved in a murder mystery. Claire is 30 but her friend is still 17 and amidst all the things that the story had to offer, their banter was given an important space. To be honest, I knew very early that this book won’t work for me. Un other murder mysteries that focus on the plot, this one was majorly about its characters. And I found none of them appealing. I pushed myself to finish the book and now it has left me in a slump.

Claire can see ghosts from the time her dead friend started making appearances ever since they were teenagers. When she discovers a ghost that has some unfinished business at the party house, Claire decides to solve the murder. And so she, Sophie, Basher (an excop) and Alex set about on a wild goose chase to unravel the mystery. Basher and Alex belong to the family that invited Claire to perform a seance and perhaps the only two normal people from that clan. As the story goes on, I found it so difficult to stay connected to the characters. I started to find everyone annoying, especially the protagonist and her ghost friend.

By the time the killer was revealed, I had had enough and was truly exhausted. Grave Expectations didn’t offer much to me and I’m not sure if I’ll read Alice’s other books. However, I also see that many have enjoyed this book so maybe a few pages into the story will help you make a decision.

Thanks for the copy @penguinindia x @reader_viddh ?16 s2 comments Ashley2,956 2,052

I knew as soon as I read the blurb for this one early in 2023 that it was going to be a book For Me. Sometimes I do turn out to be wrong about these things, but in this case I was very much right. I had such a good time with this book. (And I've had ridiculously good luck with mysteries this year, most of which are having fun with the traditional mystery format/genre).

The premise here is that Claire is a thirty-something down-on-her-luck (aren't we all (no we're not, but a lot of us are!)) medium who can actually see ghosts*. She has been able to since she was seventeen and her best friend Sophie was murdered. Speaking of Sophie, she's been with Claire ever since she was murdered, in the form of a ghost. So there's this really neat dynamic where Claire is literally carrying her ghosts around with her, and while she struggles to become an adult and leave her past behind, Sophie will forever remain seventeen. (And presumably the book series will eventually end when Sophie's murder is solved and she can move on, but that's me guessing.)

*Hilariously, she ends up faking for most of her clients anyway because the majority of the people they want to contact have already passed on, and Claire can only commune with ghosts.

The events of the book kick off when Claire is booked for the 80th birthday of the matriarch of a posh and rich old English family when she runs into an old college acquaintance. While there, Grandma kicks the bucket, but surprisingly isn't murdered. Before she moves on, her ghost asks Claire and Sophie to solve the murder of a ghost that WAS murdered on the estate. And also to find out who the ghost is in the first place, because they are unrecognizable. Soon Claire and Sophie rope in a couple of family members to the task, and set about investigating . . . well, pretty much the entire family. It is great fun.

My favorite part about this book, besides that it made me laugh out loud and I really grew to love all the characters (there's a lovely found family aspect to it in addition to everything else) was that the author takes care to provide Claire (and Sophie to an extent, even though she doesn't have POV in the book) with actual emotional conflict and character growth. This isn't going to be one of those series where all the characters are static and do the same things book after book, never changing. This is going to be the opposite of that. 

I'm very much in for however many of these Alice Bell wants to write, and I've already pre-ordered Displeasure Island (out in May 2024).

[4.5 stars, not sure if rounding up or down yet]addictive anglophilia audiobooks ...more13 s4 comments Siria1,967 1,563

Mash together Knives Out and Midsomer Murders, add in some supernatural elements and some referential millennial humour and you've got Grave Expectations. Claire is a slightly crap medium—not because she's not actually psychic but because she's bad at making a living from it—who's invited to do a gig at the big crumbling country pile of a fairly frightful family of English toffs. Soon there's a death, and Claire finds herself determined to figure out what happened at the Cloisters, in the company of her dead best friend Sophie and toff family members Basher and Alex.

Alice Bell has a gift for creating fun characters who bounce off one another in interesting ways (Claire and Sophie; Sophie and Alex), and I generally enjoyed the tone/humour throughout—there were even a couple of spots where she startled an actual laugh out of me, which is rare. I will say that I think the humour is pitched at fairly specific audience of nerdy/online millennials, so if you're not in that cohort some of this may not work for you. If, however, you have some familiarity with meme references and enjoy Midsomer Murders for its campness, I think this may be right up your alley. There are parts of the middle section of the book which I found a bit lumpy, and this is a book to read more for the characters than for the mystery, but they're the kinds of issues that are fairly common-or-garden first-novel issues that should be easy to iron out in future books. I'd happily read a sequel to this and will definitely look out for more by Bell in future.21st-century british-literature fantasy13 s Mary1,722 562

3.5/5 rounded up

Grave Expectations by Alice Bell is a really fun paranormal crime fiction debut that kept me interested in both the characters and what would happen. I will say that listening to the audiobook means you have to really concentrate otherwise it is easy to miss things/get confused, and I did find myself having to rewind quite a bit because I wasn't paying close enough attention. That being said, the audiobook was still really great to listen to, and I thought Sophie Roberts did an excellent job with the narration. The accent was a little difficult for me to understand at times, so I did end up listening to this at around 2.5-2.8x speed; 2x speed in the car.

This crime-solving group of friends gave me a bit of a diverse Scooby Doo gang vibe without Scooby, and I enjoyed the story taking place among the characters along with the actual mystery portion. It ended up getting a lot more emotional than I thought it would, but there are also plenty of funny moments to round everything out. I think Grave Expectations should be read by millennials who enjoy slower-paced ghost stories with loveable characters and quirky chapter titles. I would definitely read a follow-up to this whether the same characters are in it or not, and I can't wait to see where Bell will go next.2023-ng-group-challenge adult-fiction adventure ...more14 s Paul Sparks374 19

The synopsis made me think this book was to be a melding of Richard Osman and Ben Aaronvich and to be honest it was not a wrong assumption but with the authors own unique style, humour and angsts added into this mix, I am not going to be a bore and recant the tale all reviewers seem to feel is mandatory (it’s not, it’s boring) suffice to say in a cold, dark and wet january this book brought laughter and light into my world, so thank you very much to Alice Bell for writing it and to Netgalley for letting me read it early, I will be buying this on audible so please get a good narrator
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