**spoiler alert** 'The Undiscovered Deaths of Grace McGill' had a lot to offer – the complex storyline, unexpected revelations and strong central char**spoiler alert** 'The Undiscovered Deaths of Grace McGill' had a lot to offer – the complex storyline, unexpected revelations and strong central character in Grace made it a real page-turner. A great read overall, and another classic Glasgow-based crime mystery.
In Glasgow, Grace McGill is beginning her work in a West End tenement, where the undiscovered body of Thomas Agnew has lain decomposing for five months. A self-titled ‘death cleaner’, Grace is responsible for performing bioremediation, adopting a systematic approach of deep-cleaning, disinfecting, deodorising and decontaminating. Grace’s latest clean leaves her suspicious after she finds a dried daisy, an item she also recovered at a previous job. We soon learn about the troubled relationship she has with her alcoholic father, aswell as her peculiar hobby of creating miniature dioramas of her cleaning scenes. Attempting to gain information about Agnew and the daisy, Grace attends his funeral, meeting Bob Meechan and Jackie Stevenson, who she quickly connects to a black-and-white from Agnew’s flat, picturing five young men together in Rothesay.
Grace’s next interaction with Meechan occurs when she cleans his flat, after he lay undiscovered for two weeks, also alongside a daisy. The daisies spur her into contacting the police, who quickly dismiss her claims. When a spread on her dioramas appears in a local paper, it allows Grace access to the archives, where she stumbles upon a decades-old missing persons case linked to Rothesay. At Meechan’s funeral, Jackie Stevenson suffers a heart attack after he ferociously confronts Grace for lying to him. As Grace becomes engrossed in her investigations over the long-missing Valerie Moodie, she travels to the Isle of Bute. This introduces her to Malky McTeer, a fisherman that reported seeing a body floating in the sea after Valerie disappeared. After he brutally assaults Grace, she returns to Glasgow and visits Stevenson, pressing him for the truth about Valerie, which he refuses to accept any responsibility for. This causes Grace, in an unexpected moment of madness, to smother Stevenson.
The true work of Grace McGill is then revealed, highlighting her involvement in the killings of the lonely, troubled and pained, all of which stemmed from initially helping her mother to escape the trauma and chronic pain she had suffered from Grace’s father. Grace is also confronted by her suspected stalker, who reveals himself as Phil Canning, a son of Thomas Agnew. Fuelled by additional motivation, Grace risks exposure by attending Stevenson’s funeral, where she is ambushed by the two surviving men in the Rothesay photo – Norrie Caldow and Mick Brennan.
Grace again makes for Rothesay, this time accompanied by Canning. Here, they threaten Malky McTeer into revealing the truth surrounding Valerie Moodie. It appears Stevenson, Caldow and Brennan enlisted McTeer to sail them to the remote island of Inchmarnock, so they could dispose of Valerie’s body. Once again travelling to the island, Grace, Canning and McTeer uncover a body, leaving the remains for the police as the weather begins to worsen. As they head back across choppy waters, Grace lashes out, pushing McTeer overboard for his involvement in Valerie’s murder.
Back in Glasgow, Caldow and Brennan break into Grace’s flat, revealing that after Valerie had rejected Brennan’s advances, he forced himself onto her anyway, whilst in the struggle afterwards, she was pushed by Caldow, causing her to fall and fatally hit her head. Unbeknown to the two men, Grace has laced their wine, causing them to rapidly fall unconscious and die. With Valerie’s body finally uncovered, Grace agrees to hand herself in, though only for her early killings, and not those of the five men. In the end, we see her finishing her final diorama of her own bedroom, lying with a bottle of pills in one hand, and a single daisy in the other. ...more
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