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, rounded up]