Grave Expectations by Alice Bell

Claire Hendricks is a freelance medium whose skills are put to use putting on seances for the rich and easily-impressed. However, Claire's secret is that she really can see and speak to the dead, including her friend Sophie who has stuck to Claire's side since her own passing years earlier. What seems to be a simple gig, running a seance for the spoilt members of the Wellington-Forge family, takes a turn when a murder takes place, and Claire and Sophie find themselves investigating.

Grave Expectations is the debut novel by British writer Alice Bell, who has spent over a decade in the British video gaming press (most recently as an editor at Rock Paper Shotgun). As novels go this is not a heavyweight tome, but instead a somewhat light-hearted murder mystery romp with some unexpected bite to it.

The novel opens by establishing Claire as a thirtysomething who hasn't quite got her life together, who is constantly weighed down by flashbacks to her youth, her time at university and so forth. This isn't just pointless nostalgia but due to the very real constant presence of her best friend Sophie, who died at 17. Unlike Claire, Sophie has not been able to grow up or move on, and still reacts to everything the way a 17-year-old would, which creates an interesting dichotomy between the characters (who see in each other what the other was, or could have been). This character relationship is fascinating, but not overindulged in this first book: it's clear that what really happened to Sophia (who has no memory of the events leading to her presumed murder) is a series-long mystery that will be better explored in later novels.

The book itself focuses on the Wellington-Forge family, a largely annoying bunch of well-to-dos with some serious dysfunction going on. There's some good comedy to be mined from this, but with some real menace layered in as Claire starts uncovering their secrets.

The book displays some symptoms of debut novel-itis. The pacing is a bit off, with a lot of plot and character development packed into the first 200-odd pages but the novel then meanders a bit (with an extended trip to Brighton) for the next 150 pages or so before everything comes back together for the denouncement. It feels like experience would help smooth over the pacing issues and deliver a punchier narrative. We also get a few moments of over-exposition where it's perhaps not fully necessary.

Ranged against that is some solid character work (especially the Claire-Sophie relationship) and the novel's secret sauce, which is a real sense of acerbic bite to some of the dialogue and some fleeting, but sharp moments verging on horror. The situation Claire and Sophie are in can be played for laughs and even "cosy fantasy" (some sequences recalled the crumpets-and-blood cosiness of Kim Watt's "murder mystery but the detective is a dragon!" sequence, starting with Baking Bad) but Bell will sometimes just unleash a real sense of danger and darkness lurking behind events. These moments are relatively fleeting, but help jolt the reader that this isn't just going to be a sunshine and rainbows story with a high concept.

Grave Expectations (***½) is something of a slight  murder mystery novel, but some good character work and moments of sharp wit and grit make it more memorable than you'd expect. Certainly there's enough of interest here to make pressing on with the rest of the series worthwhile. The novel is available now, and the sequel, Displeasure Island, was recently released.

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