Alice Bell (2)

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 show more 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 writ show less

Highly entertaining vaguely murderous British romp. I appreciate that so much of the books was less of a whodoneit and more of a doneit? As they try to figure out who died before even beginning to tackle the how and the why. I love reading for character, and this was full of excellent and spiky ones, plus truly delicious descriptions of non-binary teen Alex in all their sartorial splendors. One of the other reviewers refers to them as sarcasm teen, which is just perfect. The image of them show more doing in embroidery in the back seat of the car while chatting with ghost Sophie through the medium of Claire is one of my favorites in the book. It's wacky, but not in a slapstick way. Keeps a strong hold on the emotional realities that underlay a lot of the events. Points off for excessive use of "the naughties". Points back for the merciless mocking of aged millennials by aforementioned sarcasm teen. show less

A fun new mystery in this series, and I hope not the last. This one has a somewhat teenage "best friends falling out over boys" scenario, but consider that one of the friends is actually a dead teen ghost, the boys include a ghost pirate, and the falling out could lead to attempted murder—admit it, you're interested. Claire Hendricks, terrible at being a healthy adult but excellent at being a medium and recovering from her first experience as an unlikely detective, ends up on a wellness show more retreat with her exactly 3 friends (extremely out of character for all) when the guests who aren't in her existing squad start dropping like flies. As a non-British person I feel like I had a bit of a leg up on solving this one, but there was another twisty element to the murder mystery that did take me by surprise. Did not make me want to visit gloomy haunted islands! show less

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 show more 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. show less