I started reading this book thinking it was a normal crime mystery, however there is a twist about half-way through and the story goes into a totally unexpected direction.
The story is set in Glasgow, Grace McGill is a death cleaner, who has her own company, Last Wish Cleaning, specialising in the very grim job of cleaning the homes where the people who have died haven’t been discovered for some time after death. Grace lives alone with her cat George, who sounds adorable and it quickly becomes clear from the character development that she is a very troubled and damaged character, which stems from her childhood with her father being a thoroughly nasty piece of work. Grace is a loner who is very shy, timid and avoids attention but still manages to be very assertive and ruthless in trying to solve a mystery she is investigating.
She finds a small daisy left near the body at several of the homes she is cleaning and starts to wonder if the deaths are connected. The police initially aren’t interested, writing her off as a crank. She then starts her own investigation and finds a possible link to the disappearance of 17 year old Valerie Moodie in 1964.
I enjoyed reading this book with it being very original and a change from the crime mysteries that I usually read.

Grace is a cleaner working in a very specialised area - cleaning properties after the owner's death has been undiscovered for some time. It takes a certain type of person to do this job and Grace is quite suited to it as she is quite a loner.

Grace comes across a couple of clues and suspects that some of the bodies that she has cleaned up after have not met with a peaceful death after all. Her concerns are not taken seriously by the police and she decides to look into the case of a missing teenager from the 1960s. She quickly finds that uncovering the past is more dangerous than she expected.

This is a very interesting and absorbing story. The mystery is tightly drawn and unveilled with mastery. The ending is quite unexpected and very well written. A chilling read. Would recommend.

Thanks netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read this very strange book.
It was not until I was half way through it that I began to understand what it was all about.
One understood I had to keep reading and really enjoyed the second half.
Grace is a very strange girl, she has a job cleaning homes after the death of a person who has been left dead for a period of time, she has to bleach and disinfect everywhere so there is no germs or smells of death.
Death is something Grace understands, and she has no problems with it.
Love the book but would have loved to understand it earlier.

Definitely different from anything I’ve read before.
Grace is not your ordinary cleaner - she has her own business cleaning up after dead people, particularly people who’ve died alone and not found for a while which adds to the gory details of her cleaning job.
Grace is lonely, quite sad, a bit strange but has an inner strength when needed. She lives with her rescue cat and is bullied by her dad whom she looks after despite his nasty behaviour when he’s drunk which is often.
Grace cares for the people who have died and when she is called to a flat of an elderly man who has lain dead for 5 months - not somewhere most of us would like to be.
The more we learn of Grace the more strange she appears and behaves. The Dioramas were just weird but she notices things others don’t and this is what gets her into trouble.
I really enjoyed the book as it jumped from one shock/surprise to another - a lot of twists and turns I didn’t foresee.
If, like me, you want something different,quirky, excitement and crime thrown in then this is the book for you.
Highly recommended . 4.5 Stars ⭐️
Thanks to Netgalley for allowing me to read this book in return for a fair review.

Wow!

I certainly did not expect the plot twists in this book!

The first half is quite slow, doesn’t seem like there is much going on but then at the halfway point, the story starts to develop and reveal more details that you would not expect.

I liked the murder mystery side to the story - with Grace wanting to find out the dead peoples secrets.

The ending was completely unexpected but also very fitting with the story.

Set in Glasgow this book centers around Grace McGill; a cleaner who specialises in cleaning up homes where people have died and were left undiscovered for some time.

Grace lives a largely solitary life. She has a flat where she lives with her rescue cat but also pops in to see her father in his flat, cooking and cleaning for him and often facing a barrage of verbal abuse.

She becomes involved in solving a mystery triggered by one of her cleaning jobs.

As part of her work, she photographs the rooms in the deceased’s homes, in case relatives want to see them. And she also goes one step further and she begins to make dioramas of the crimes - macabre miniatures of the rooms she cleans.

Although it is slow burn initially with a bit of a character study but by the halfway point the pace really picked up and things got really tense and very interesting.

This psychological drama has a great plot with lots of twists and turns and I enjoyed the character development.

Everything is not quite as it seems in this story, especially when it comes to Grace.

The main character is Grace whose job it is to deep clean houses where the occupant has died alone at home. She chooses especially the situations where the deceased has been undiscovered for some weeks or months making her task often really difficult and dangerous to health but she appears to get great satisfaction from.it. To add to the unusual grace collects small items from each of the premises and at home skillfully crafts an extremely detailed scale diorama from the room she has visited. She is a lonely women with only a cat for company and an abusive alcoholic father in her life.
Grace involves herself in a 60 year-old death mystery but her reason for doing so is somewhat difficult to understand from the reasons given. She even travels to the Scottish isles in her 'investigation'.
An interesting approach and character which for me falls just short of being and excellent read.
My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for this chance to leave an honest and unbiased review in exchange for this ARC.

Well this was an intersting story for sure! From what I usually read it was a very different kind of plot.
The story is about Grace, who's job it is to clean up after people have died. She is a unique charakter and I could totally connect with her- not through the job ;) She is a loner, quirky, and some kind of weird. But absolutely loveable!
Thanks #NetGalley #Hodder & Stoughton for the ARC of this book

Creepy, Disquieting, Subtle, Thought Provoking, Addictive,

Just some of the ways to sum up this absolutely phenomenal book which kept me up until the wee small hours to finish. A mystery within a mystery, there are hundreds of thoughts and emotions that run through your mind as you are completely absorbed in the life of Grace McGill.

Wow a book that drew me in and then had so many twists and turns that I could not put it down.Grace a death cleaner first appears to be quirky a but as the story continues she starts to appear to be sinister a truly strange personality.Highly recommend this totally unusual shocking read.#netgalley #hodderstoughton.

This was a dark and disturbing one that had some really unexpected twists, with the tension ever present. I doubt you will have read anything like it - I hadn’t!

‘Mr Agnew isn’t going to give two f@%ks if I’m late. He’s already dead’
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This was a slow burn for me… I was approaching 50% and debating DNFing it, but I looked at some reviews that said it turns around at 50% and the story gets much more interesting, and I will agree that if you can get through the slow beginning then it does take a very interesting twist in which I didn’t see coming
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DEATH IS NOT THE END. FOR GRACE McGILL IT IS ONLY THE BEGINNING.
When people die alone and undiscovered, it’s her job to clean up what’s left behind – whether it’s clutter, bodily remains or dark secrets.
When an old man lies undetected in his flat for months, it seems an unremarkable life and an unnoticed death. But Grace knows that everyone has a story and that all deaths mean something more.
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The premise alone is very intriguing, I don’t think the cover did anything for me in terms of swaying me to read this, but I haven’t read a book yet, and I read a lot of crime books, but I’m yet to see this profession come up as a lead storyline. It was slightly gruesome at points but so fascinating to read and you can tell the author has done a lot of research into it which is always nice to see come through in the words. The story does take a twist that is so good and goes in many directions I just never saw coming and still don’t fully know how it took quite so many left turns. I would say this is definitely one worth picking up though!!
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Thank you to Netgalley & Hodder & Stoughton for the ARC!

I chose to review this book because of the description. I didn't realise that I knew of the author. Craig Robertson is a very good mystery thriller writer. A good many of his books feature a Glasgow based police detective Rachel Narey. She doesn't feature in this one but this is an excellent book nontheless.
Grace McGill has lived in Glasgow all her life. Not yet middle aged, but an abusive father who made her late mother's life a misery, has left her disappointed in life. She lives with her cat George in a flat in a run down area.
Grave works as a specialist cleaner. If someone dies at home and remain undiscovered for sometime, Grace makes sure that the deep clean ensures no contamination is left at the end.
Her father is still alive and lives nearby making unwelcome demands on Grace to shop and clean for him.
One of Grace's cleaning cases makes her suspicious. A dried daisy is left near where he died. A group photograph of five young men holidaying in Rothesay makes her suspicious when two of the friends deny they were there. Grace investigates going back to the sixties when the photograph was taken, and suspects that a missing young girl from this time might have something to do with the five men.
She decides to visit the island of Bute to get a feel for the missing girl. But someone is watching her every move!
I highly recommend this book. It keeps you reading. Plenty of twists and shocks. The ending is very poignant.
I hadn't realised that the singer Lena Zavaroni and her family originated in Rothesay. She had such a short and difficult life. I knew the man that she was briefly married to.
I look forward to more from this talented author.

Grace has the unusual job of cleansing murder crime scenes. As this isn't strange enough, she has a habit of collecting things from the crime scene to keep as a momento. She is a loner who shares her life with a house cat and an abusive alcoholic cat. One crime leads to a chain of events that you won't be able to predict - there are a couple of twists in the tale that will surprise you. A good read.

I really enjoyed this book, although there was a bit of a change of direction half way through. It was a very clever idea though and beautifully written.

This is the first book I have read by this author and enjoyed the style of writing. The story was intriguing, dark and immensely sad. Grace has the job of cleaning up residences after the tenant has died. She appears to strangely get great satisfaction from this task.

Grace’s character grew on me and I had sympathy for her difficult life. Her father was abhorrent, so well characterised that I really disliked him.

All in all, this book is a very different book and drew me in.

A very strange story with a very strange main character. A cleaner who cleans homes where people have died but not been discovered for months and a decades old mystery all rolled into one ,never mind the biggest twist of all.

A very unusual book; I really liked the first half, and thought the point of view of people working to clean up the scene of a death was a very interesting and unexplored one. It made me think how sad it is that people are left growing old in isolation, and we probably don't really appreciate how many people die without no one noticing for a long time, which is sad. I really enjoyed the fact that the science behind death and decomposition was examined and explained, and the mystery taking shape was very intriguing.

However, the book fell short for me in the second half. The way the mystery was dealt with and solved simply didn't seem believable to me. Why did she become so obsessed with the case in the first place? The hidden picture and the papers were just not enough to justify it. The trip she undertook to solve a possible crime committed 60 years before was a bit odd.

It was a shame because the premise was excellent and this could have been an amazing book.

Thanks to Netgalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This review is on Goodreads and I'll put it on Amazon on 20 January, the publication date.

Though I’m not certain if the title character exemplifies the current vogue for narrators who are somewhere ‘on the spectrum’, Grace is most surely not well endowed with social skills. She lives alone with no friends except for her cat George (found appropriately in a cemetery). Her mother is dead, but she endures the importunities of her father, a nasty alcoholic. Appropriately they live in Glasgow. (Does Scotland harbour the most repulsive drinkers and druggies?) But Grace has the perfect occupation for a person of her social skills; she’s a ‘death cleaner’. When you discover a tenant died alone in one of your flats and has been decomposing for weeks, after the cops have carried away the pestiferous remains you call Grace for a thorough cleaning and disinfecting of the premises. Grace also has an odd hobby; she crafts dioramas of the death scenes, carefully reproducing in miniature all the details – except fortunately the corpses. Curiosity about one of her ‘clients’, Tommy Agnew, leads her to attending the funeral and then to the ‘crem’ where Grace pretends to be the grand-niece of the deceased and actually stages a wake at a nearby pub for Bob and Jackie, the only mourners. Grace had found an old photo at Agnew’s flat showing five teen-aged boys, Tommy, Bob, Jackie, and two others. It was taken at Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, which used to be a popular holiday resort back in the 1960s. Backtracking in newspaper achieves, Grace discovers a cold case, a seventeen-year-old girl named Valerie Moodie, who disappeared on a holiday trip to Bute in July 1964. Grace becomes obsessed with the case, travelling by train and ferry to Rothesay, tracking down the places Valerie and her friends stayed, and questioning an alcoholic old fisherman who had reported seeing a floating body, but later retracted.

As it so often the case with mystery stories using a first-person narrator, Grace actually knew more about Tommy Agnew than we find out till much later in the book, which explained something I found puzzling, why Grace keeps lying about her identity, first pretending to be a relative of Agnew’s and later to being a journalist investigating a cold case. (If it were me, I’d simply have claimed to be a free-lance true crime writer – no problem is awkward questions about what paper I worked for. Though I was delighted to discover there actually was a paper called The Bute-Man in the old days.). The title, The Undiscovered Deaths of Grace McGill, turns out to signify more than it might appear on the surface, what in grammar are called the subjective and objective genitive.

I had been aware that the Earl of Rothesay is Prince Charles’s title when he is in Scotland, but Rothesay and Bute were new to me and made me wish I’d had the chance to visit, though not in June. The sailing looks great. Some of the events in this story struck me as improbable – I certainly hope it’s not so easy to gain access to a cardiology patient unobserved: some of the things British mystery story writers allow to happen in hospital are not great advertisements for the NHS. But I loved the settings in Glasgow; the Royal Infirmary is indeed and imposing pile. If you enjoy the novels of Helen Fitzgerald, I think you will like this one too. Grace is as eccentric as Fitzgerald’s principal characters, though not quite so amusing and likeable. I certainly anticipate C. R. Robertson’s next book.
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Wow okay, this book is like reading 2 in 1. The entire thing flips so much in the middle that I found myself rereading pages just to check I wasn't confused.

Its like nothing I've read before and I'll aaalwwwwaaaysss love a story that blurs the lines between right and wrong so perfectly. An interesting read for sure. I think this really will be a must read for 2022 for a lot of people. Good luck!!!