Picked this up being a fan of Alice Bell from Rock, Paper, Shotgun so perhaps a little bias but really enjoyed everything about this story.

I will definitely look out for Alice Bell in the future, whether Claire and Sophie are part of it or not.Sophie is a great character and I imagine/hope we will be seeing more of her and Claire, Basher and Alex in further books. She has probably read more detective fiction and watched more episodes of Midsomer Murders than you.

Light and engaging with great characters ,if you like the TV Series Ghost you will love this book it is charming funny clever and a great read. I couldn’t have loved this more and would urge any mystery reader to settle down for the weekend with this, as you won’t want to put it down! Clever, unpredictable and a genuinely humorous modern day country house murder mystery which left me guessing. As Claire desperately tries to keep Investigating with Claire and Sophie are Basher and his nephew Alex, they are directly related to Nana and are good side kicks for Claire and bring her out of her shell.

Claire is thirtysomething, but she's been literally haunted by Sophie since their teens, and it's left Claire in a kind of arrested development: not quite fully adult, mostly friendless apart from the dead, isolated by virtue of her ability to see dead people, and stuck in a rut. After reading too many who-done-its, I hoped Grave Expectations would suit my twisted sense of humour. Whenever Alex was described as 'they/them/their', I kept thinking someone else had arrived in the scene, causing my confusion and ruining the flow of the plot. It is all too easy to picture the action and alternately empathise with Clare and despair of her as she bumbles about trying to solve ‘the case’. Thank you the author Alice, Atlantic Books and NetGalley for the ARC, this review is my personal, unbiased opinion.

Clare has been ‘haunted’ by her best friend Sophie ever since the latter was murdered in mysterious circumstances at the age of seventeen. Arriving at The Cloisters, Claire and Sophie discover an unquiet spirit, who had met a recent untimely end but is unable to communicate. How exciting to find a modern murder mystery with a paranormal twist and interesting main characters! Thankfully Claire has Sophie to help otherwise, as Sophie quite rightly puts it, nothing would get detected because Claire is rubbish at it. Hired by a rich family for their Nana’s birthday party, Claire and Sophie find themselves drawn into the mystery of an unquiet spirit who, they believe, was murdered by a member of the family.

Figgy has asked her to provide the 'entertainment' at her grandmother's birthday party as Claire works as a medium so a paid séance is in the offing. 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! Started well ie haunted mansion, family secrets, seance but got dull and boring once the group left for Brighton. It’s a really great mystery novel, a good story and all ends are neatly tied off and it was really funny and I want more of Claire and Sophie and Basher and Alex and really I want to know what happened to make Sophie a ghost. If, like me, that specific cultural humour happens to be directed fairly solidly at Your Personal Brand of Existence, you'll probably get along very well with it.