With no clues at all to go on, apart from a date; Claire, Sophie enlist the help of Figgy’s family members Alex and Basher and together they race to find the body of the deceased and identify their murderer.

After reading too many who-done-its, I hoped Grave Expectations would suit my twisted sense of humour. Plus, she's growing up but Sophie will always be 17 and sometimes it's not easy to communicate with her. 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.I found myself enjoying the mystery, but I didn’t care for any of the characters so there were times where I didn’t feel super invested in this book. The book started well but soon slowed down and by the time I had sorted everyone out (living and ghosts), I began to lose interest, especially as many characters were thoroughly unpleasant.

Invited to provide ‘entertainment’ at the country house of an old friend it soon becomes clear that something is amiss. In hindsight, I don't know why I requested this one from NetGalley - the fun title and cover, I suspect. I would definitely read a follow-up to this whether the same characters are in it or not, and I can't wait to see where Bell will go next. And with the help of the only obviously not-guilty members of their host family—sexy ex-policeman Sebastian and far-too-cool non-binary teen Alex—they launch an investigation into which of last year's guests never escaped the manor's grounds. Thank you so much to NetGallery and Atlantic Books for providing me with an eARC for an honest review.Sophie is a great character and I imagine/hope we will be seeing more of her and Claire, Basher and Alex in further books. And I've had ridiculously good luck with mysteries this year, most of which are having fun with the traditional mystery format/genre).

As Claire desperately tries to keep a lid on the shameful secret that would definitely alienate her new friends, the gang must race against their own incompetence to find the murderer before the murderer finds them.

Claire meets loads of dead people, and if I'm remembering right all of them just died because that's what people do. 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.

I also like whodunnits, so that should have been a plus point, but that's where it started to go wrong.I loved it and I hope that Alice Bell will come back with more tales about Clare and Sophie, perhaps even squirrelling out more about the circumstances surrounding Sophie’s disappearance and murder.