The Undiscovered Deaths of Grace McGill – Craig Robertson

Title – The Undiscovered Deaths of Grace McGill

Author – C. S. Robertson

Published – 20 Jan 2022

Genre – Crime

I’d like to remind people who’ve read my blog previously that Craig Robertson is one of my favourite contemporary authors, however as this book is published under the name C S Robertson and I’ve seen it referred to as a debut I wonder if that could be construed as a spoiler…

So – different name, different publisher but same excellent crime vibes!

Grace McGill is an unusual young woman with an unusual job – she’s the person that’s called in to clean a property when someone has died, but Grace specialises in deaths where the person hasn’t been discovered for weeks or months. Not a job for the faint hearted! She takes her job very seriously and even though the body will have been removed from the property before she starts her work she still feels a connection to the person who has died, she’s even been known to go to their funeral.

Grace lives a very solitary and insular life. She carries out her work alone, lives alone and her only relationship seems to be with her alcoholic father who is needy, demanding and generally unpleasant. Grace admits that she can find herself obsessed with things and as a way of ‘decompressing’ from her work she’s been making miniature dioramas of the homes she has cleaned. Something in the style of Frances Glessner Lee, called the ‘mother of forensic science’, who created dollhouse-size true crime scenes. But these are unexplained deaths not crimes…

Grace’s obsessive personality comes in to play when she cleans the home of an elderly man and is intrigued by some of the things that he’s left behind, stacks of old newspapers and a group photograph of five young men from the 1960s. In an effort to find out more about the man’s past she attends his funeral and even hosts his wake … and uncovers the beginnings of a mystery that stretches back decades. And Grace can’t leave it alone, her obsession sees her behave out of character – stepping out of her comfort zone to follow in the footsteps of another young woman who disappeared more than fifty years ago. This then takes the reader on a more traditional crime fiction arc with Grace as an amateur sleuth who gets herself into deep water. But Grace has hidden depths herself!

There are some unexplained actions by Grace but she’s such an odd and complex character that what doesn’t seem logical to the reader may well make complete sense to her! It’s tempting to say that she’s an unreliable narrator but she’s perhaps more of a deluded narrator.

Although we learn a lot about Grace’s backstory, I was still curious to know more about her and how she became the person in the book. The disadvantage of a first-person narrative is the reader’s inability to see the character as others see them and I’d have been interested to see Grace from someone else’s perspective – to see how strange (or not) she seemed to others.

An unusual lead character, an unusual perspective and a disturbing story with some twist and turns. I did enjoy the book and can recommend it as something different (but without appearing to be trying hard to be different) however I have to say that I probably get more pleasure from reading the Narey and Winter series.

Many thanks to the publisher for the NetGalley.