Grave Expectations

Honestly, this is the sort of book I would have never chosen for myself - but it was a paid for recommendation and so I prepared to read it. And I only stop recommended books if they are totally irredeemable. This book isn't awful in same way as that, just totally awful for me. Though, I will admit, I think I started to become immune to it by the 200 page mark (or so) and started just watching the pretty fireworks as the train wreck exploded.

The mystery itself is actually the only half decent thing in the story. (...I don't think I've ever said that before.) It's interesting because the mystery actually starts with not knowing who the victim is. Which I find a unique approach to the standard mystery. And because 1) there is no body and 2) none of the ‘sleuths' are official in any sort of capacity, it takes almost the whole book before they figure out who the victim actually is.

Which is the issue with the mystery: it's not investigated very well or consistently. Claire is a bad detective. Sophie is useless. I mean, you have this ghost tied to you, but it changes actually nothing about the case than if she'd been Claire's niece.

The only thing having a ghost influences with the mystery was the introduction to the case and I can personally think of at least three other ways that could have been contrived (and I'm sure inventive people can think of several more). It turns out that my original idea, that I put down in the first, vitriol filled review of this book (of which this is the third!) would have solved the mystery after, oh, 150 pages. (Or less.) What? Talk to the local ghosts. You can talk to them. You have a ghost that can talk to them attached to you. Do you do it? No! Why not? ... Who knows! (But, seriously, why not?)

Claire conducts one séance. Okay, more like half a séance. After the mystery starts, the only ghost she really talks to is Sophie. Which...I would expect there to be more, kind of random spirits and, really, it's a surprise that she doesn't utilize her abilities to interview the ghosts of the house. I can only imagine this was kind of a selling point for this story and it is underutilized.

The ‘ghost bff' sounds like the elevator pitch for a humorous book, right? This book is billed as ‘hilarious,' right? But the usage of the ghost bff actually brings up the most depressing, maudlin, unhealthy, toxic, unpleasant parts of this whole story. (And, to be fair, most of it is unpleasant.)

I can only assume that these depressive funk moments were to balance out the laugh out loud moments of the rest of the book.

...

Oh, wait, there was none.

I'm guessing that the strange similes and comparisons and random flights of fancy that Claire has is supposed to be funny - but all I really got was wishing that she'd see a good therapist. (She compares the Underground to being in the womb. I am truly never getting over that.)

Claire's just impossible to actually like. She doesn't take her job seriously, though it's the only way she can make money, apparently. She reads so much younger than she is. This is not a thirty-something that treats her job like a profession, this is a teenager that treats her job as a way to get drunk on someone else's dime.

After her first ‘bit of séance' - which was basically a séance without the ‘hold hands and open your channel' parts - Basher (the local skeptic and former cop) is talking to her and telling her that he'll figure out her tricks and to not do what she did - pretend to pass along a message - one that certainly did not exist - from one of Nana's loved ones.

‘“It's her birthday,” he said again, embarrassingly earnest. “She is old. Leave Nana alone.”
Claire held up both her hands. “All right, all right - you got me. Don't arrest me. Oh, wait, you can't.” She was snapping back at him like a sulky child, and regretted it straight away.'

...I hate her. I hate her so much. Then...Look, she's a medium. And she derides and belittles the ... profession (?). “The, uh, circle is broken, or whatever.” (I'm not a medium and am not even 100% sure I believe in this stuff, but, this is just another way she half-asses everything to do with her ‘job.')

I do not like the casual drug use in the book. It's not something I particularly like reading about, ever. Claire, as well as teen Alex, get high on marijuana. Claire has done cocaine sometime in her past. (Both of which caused me to look up drug laws in the UK to find out if they differ greatly from the US. They differ slightly, in that marijuana is illegal country wide in the UK and it isn't in the US (where it varies by state and almost half the states - at the time of me writing this - have legalized recreational marijuana).)

Look, the first night she spends with these clients of hers, she drinks enough red wine while she's eating that she was ‘feeling quite hot and sick' and then later on she ‘opens a window to cool down and suppress her nausea'. After which she proceeds to smoke enough marijuana with the aforementioned teen to get ‘pissed and high'. (And then admits to being ‘really quite high'.)

She gets drunk five times in this book, three times to the point of hangover, once to the point of blackout (the word ‘blackout' was literally used here to describe this!). Is it fun reading about someone getting dunk? Because I personally have never found it so.

‘It was unfair for someone to be annoying whilst living through legitimate sadness, because Claire wasn't allowed to be annoyed by it, which was even more annoying, and it locked her in an ouroboros of being a shitty person.'

(But she is a shitty person. Some people might like reading books about shitty people. I do not.)

She uses cutesy made up words like ‘investigatoring.' She uses the word ‘detectoring' - which is in actual word usage (even if my dictionary disagrees) though she probably does not realize it. She also uses it improperly, as I think she probably thought it meant ‘detecting' as in ‘sleuthing' not ‘detecting' as in what people do with a metal detector (which is how it's used!). She listens to three true crime pod casts because, of course, every millennial, ever, does that.

The ghostly bff that is even more of a painful character than Claire is. Sophie uses ‘lol' and ‘ohmigosh' in probably every conversation she's in. At least once. (Until shit gets real.)

These two are exhausting to be around. I read maybe ten pages of this book and I am already so tired, just hearing them talk and be terrible, obnoxious people.

(Also, Claire keeps a hair clip that Sophie was likely wearing when she was murdered in a plastic bag that used to contain cocaine. Just, you know, share my misery.)

Oh, and when Claire first meets the ambiguously gendered ‘Alex' she asks “Is that -andra or -ander?”

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