You'd Look Better as a Ghost is a fun female serial killer book.

Claire has got a nasty habit of killing people who she believes deserve to die. Like a part-time Dexter, but with lower standards of evil. She's also newly bereaved as her beloved dad has died and she's joined a grief support group, which produces additional issues with people trying to get to know her.

An enjoyable romp for lovers of the Sweet Pea books.

Fun and original. A bit mad but I do enjoy the kind of premise of a woman going mad and killing people.
So when Claire enters a time of her life when she seems to have no luck, she responds terribly. Or entertainingly, for us.
I think for people that enjoy books by Mona Awad, Ottessa Moshfegh or She's a Killer, this is for you.

EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS BOOK!

Sometimes you just need a serial killer to come along and capture your attention… Wallace has created an absolute gem with this one. Everything about this book just oozes excellence.

Claire is brilliant. I have loved her, she is relatable, likeable and I’ve enjoyed the journey through this one with her. The negative, Claire is a serial killer. It feels strange to say that I have liked a serial killer but just something about her has been brilliant.

This is an addictive and unpredictable read. I have devoured this over the period of twenty four hours because I have been so unwilling to put this down. I am a converted fan of Wallace and already eagerly anticipating what may be coming next.

This is beautifully written and pulls you in quickly. Wallace has captured my attention and held me hostage until the very last page. I love the unpredictability of Claire and not knowing when she will strike next. Wallace has made me feel as though I have been watching this one play out ahead of me.

I love that we get glimpses into the past which allow us to understand Claire even deeper. Wallace has filled this book with grief, lies and murder. However, I have loved every moment. This is a book that has had me torn between wanting to devour quickly and wanting to savour every last sentence.

I can safely say that Wallace is definitely going to be an author to watch out for. This book is just completely fantastic, there is nothing negative I can say about this gem.

This book should be on everyone’s TBR. You’d be missing out not to read this one. It’s a brilliant read and one I highly recommend.

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS BOOK!

Sometimes you just need a serial killer to come along and capture your attention… Wallace has created an absolute gem with this one. Everything about this book just oozes excellence.

Claire is brilliant. I have loved her, she is relatable, likeable and I’ve enjoyed the journey through this one with her. The negative, Claire is a serial killer. It feels strange to say that I have liked a serial killer but just something about her has been brilliant.

This is an addictive and unpredictable read. I have devoured this over the period of twenty four hours because I have been so unwilling to put this down. I am a converted fan of Wallace and already eagerly anticipating what may be coming next.

This is beautifully written and pulls you in quickly. Wallace has captured my attention and held me hostage until the very last page. I love the unpredictability of Claire and not knowing when she will strike next. Wallace has made me feel as though I have been watching this one play out ahead of me.

I love that we get glimpses into the past which allow us to understand Claire even deeper. Wallace has filled this book with grief, lies and murder. However, I have loved every moment. This is a book that has had me torn between wanting to devour quickly and wanting to savour every last sentence.

I can safely say that Wallace is definitely going to be an author to watch out for. This book is just completely fantastic, there is nothing negative I can say about this gem.

This book should be on everyone’s TBR. You’d be missing out not to read this one. It’s a brilliant read and one I highly recommend.

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Claire is mourning the loss of her father and has been sent to a bereavement group by her GP however, all is not as it seems as Claire is a serial killer. I know you’re not supposed to love serial killers, but I loved Claire with her quirky but thoroughly honest outlook on life (and death). I just laughed out loud at the outlandish characters, and the quite absurd situations that Claire manages to get into ( and is it alright to want her to kill some of the people in the novel?). Having said that the novel also deals with some tough topics including child and elder abuse. I was enjoying it so much that I also listened to it on audio and the narrator is a genius and had me laughing even more. I will definitely be looking out from more from this author and this book is definitely one of my top books of the year. Many thanks to Net galley and the publisher for the ARC of this novel in return for an honest review.

I love a female serial killer! Give me a morally grey, witty female protagonist who’s a bit stabby and I’m here for it! This one was no exception.

Although I feel like there has been an influx of this type of read as of late, this one managed to stand out and be original.

I loved Claire, she was a well developed and really likeable character. One who you know has done terrible things, but you root for not to get caught all the same.

The storyline was interesting and the supporting characters were well fleshed out and really added to the plot. The twists were interesting and well done, nothing felt out of place or done for the sake of it either.

I enjoyed the use of dual timelines to help build a better picture of Claire and her life. I definitely think this helped with character development and made her seem more real. Also relatable!

I really enjoyed it, will definitely be recommending and I’m excited to read more from the author.

*I did purchase the audiobook to read alongside and it is absolutely brilliant!*

I love the title of this book and I was intrigued to start reading. The story is told from the viewpoint of the main character Claire, who just happens to be a serial killer. It's an enjoyable read with dark humour throughout.

Before I talk about the content of You’d Look Better As A Ghost, I have to mention the cover. I love it. It’s simple, bold, bright (the hubby said garish) and for me, it’s got a slight pulp fiction feel to it. Striking is possibly the best word for it!

I loved meeting Claire. Yes she does have the best name and it is spelt right 😂 but she is a brilliant protagonist too. she’s wrapped in grief for the one person in the world who ever looked out for her, her dad. As I followed Claire around, she gave me snippets of her upbringing, showing me how her dad was her one true friend.

As I got to know Claire and got to “see” her righting the wrongs against her, I started to sympathise with her. She was mentally in a rough place losing her dad, some incompetent bar steward giving her a sniff of success before whipping it away from (stupid boy, soon paid for that mistake). But then Pandora’s box is opened when Claire meets Jenna at a bereavement group and a catalogue of events unfolded leading me through a very entertaining enjoyable read.

This reminds me of How To Kill Your Family and How To Kill Men And Get Away With It, mixed with a little bit of Sweetpea. It’s dark with its humour with a female lead who is ridding the world of people she believes need to pay. Wallace has created a remarkable tale that had me rooting from the killer, the one I’d normally want to be caught but in Claire, I wanted her to succeed in her mission

You’d look Better as a Ghost. Is a stand-alone debut book.

A story of a serial killer. It is full of quirky dark humor with lots of twists and turns.

A well-written fast fast-paced story with an abundance of likeable characters.

It is all murder, lies and abuse with a dash of kidnapping.

Loved this book a must for any dark humour fans.

Thank you #Netgalley for the advanced copy.

I'm going to start by saying I absolutely loved this book and can't wait to read more by the author!

This novel is about Claire, who is a serial killer. Narrated between a time before her first kill and the present, this book really dives into why Claire is the way she is and also what her thoughts and impulses are.
Her kills seem to be mostly motivated by feeling of justice (for example killing care home nurses who were abusive), but then again her sense of justice sometimes is a bit skewed...
I found this spooky but also very funny, and full of twists that I didn't expect (but not the type of twists you would find in any old thriller).
I would definitely recommend this is you love shows like Dexter or You!

Clare is not a woman I would like to meet in a bar but it's surely a fascinating characters. The serial killer are great at manipulating and seducing and she's the perfect example.
I liked her even if I'm a bit tired of reading of serial killer as pop hero but this one was very good.
I hope to read soon other book by this author.
Don't read this book just after "Bright Young Woman" because it could be a bit uncomfortable.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

A darkly delicious novel about a serial killer grieving the death of her father. As Claire tries to grapple with her grief she becomes more reckless with her 'hobby' and as the bodies pile up someone begins to watch Claire. With the web closing will she be able to escape?

I loved Claire (even though she was pretty horrible) but the cast of characters was so intriguing that I couldn't put the novel down. A thriller with a twist; I wanted the murderer to get away with it!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of the novel in exchange for an honest review.

It doesn’t seem quite right to have a serial killer novel which also makes you laugh out loud. Yet here we are. You’d Look Better as a Ghost definitely had me laughing but there are also scenes which give you pause for thought, how we treat other people and how they treat us runs through the heart of this story and Joanna Wallace uses this to extremely efficient effect.

We meet Claire. She’s recently lost her father and is attending grief counselling but her group brings together a rather odd assortment of people. There’s an extremely angry Welshman, a furious note-taker, a “nice” lady who will be deeply offended by bad language (which is unfortunate given the presence of the Welshman) and there is Claire too – she’s a serial killer and the star of this book.

Claire sees the world as a slightly better place when some people who have done bad things are no longer in the world. So Claire may take mattes into her own hands an murder those bad people. Her garden is a busy old spot and inside her house there are some very unusual decorations.

Feeling slightly out of sorts while she grieves Claire decides she is going to murder someone who emailed her by mistake, apologised, but Claire didn’t think he looked sorry enough when she tracked him down.

Unfortunately for Claire she’s not as careful as normal and inadvertently kills a man who had his own criminal endeavours on the go and his partner in crime is going to find out what Claire knows about his disappearance.

In her grief therapy group Claire realises one of their number may not be quite what they appear but can she work out who’s keeping secrets before her own secrets are revealed?

I know we shouldn’t really be rooting for the killer in a crime novel but Joanna Wallace puts the reader on Claire’s side. We see young Claire, a young child, and how she thinks and behaves differently from the other kids around her. Then we get an insight into her home life and some insight into some of what may have shaped Claire’s formative years.

What I found most compelling was Joanna Wallace’s portrayal of vulnerability and how she plays on our perceptions of those vulnerabilities. I couldn’t possibly elaborate on that (spoilers) but when some plot threads were unraveled I was applauding the slick way I had been played.

I really enjoyed You’d Look Better as a Ghost, it’s clever, funny and unpredictable. I’d certainly welcome more stories like this and I’m crossing my fingers I’ll get my wish.

I've read a suprising amount of books about female serial killers over the last few years. I don't know what that says but this was one of the best. The blurb describes it as Dexter meets Killing Eve which is actually pretty accurate. Sinister and humorous, this had a edge that cuts right through you.

In an interesting approach, Claire is both a grieving daughter in a support group and a sociopathic series killer. She's a wicked protagonist. Her thought process threw me off balance so many times but always kept me hooked.

This book fits so well into the current literary landscape, I expect it will definitely find its audience.

I was immediately grabbed this story from the first chapter, even though I am generally not so keen on the kind of psychological thriller where you know who dunnit at the outset. And initially it seemed clear that this was that kind of book. However, it soon developed into another kind of mystery altogether with a skillfully layered plot, and splendid characterisations.
Our heroine is Claire, (a deeply disturbed individual), whose murderous actions alongside her unfiltered critical observations of those around her provide the darkly comic elements of the book. We see many sides of Claire, including the poignantly awful memories of her mother, delivered in the form of "stories" she wrote as a child, and her fierce loyalty to her Father (who to be blunt should have had her sectioned at an early age but....). Claire directs her violence towards those she feels deserve it - those whom she "sees as ghosts" before they die; unfortunately, the shortcomings of her justice system are obvious when there seem to be a few extra corpses evident as collateral damage along the way. Despite all this, we are all rooting for Claire with her warped sense of morality; she is rather comparable to Highsmith's Ripley, or (as others have observed) Jennings' Villanelle.

My whole soul was submerged into this dark tale. I bloody well loved it. Claire is everything I want in a character; dark, funny and a complete odd job (in a good way!). Like so many other readers, I won’t be able to look at a fish tank in the same way again 😆 You’d Look Better As A Ghost is the perfect story to occupy you during the dark, autumnal nights.

“…I smile, enjoying my favourite part of the process. The part when I know they’re going to die soon. The part when I can anticipate every moment of their deaths. The part when I already see them as ghosts.”

Grieving the recent death of her father, the disappointment of being rejected for an art prize triggers Claire’s worst instincts. Eschewing her usual careful planning, she impulsively takes her revenge, luring art critic Lucas Kane to her home where she dispatches him with the satisfaction death always brings her, but unbeknownst to Claire, someone was watching.

This propels Claire into a battle of wits with a similarly sociopathic foe who has infiltrated Claire’s bereavement support group in order to blackmail her. I enjoyed their attempts to out manoeuvre one another and gain the upper hand. But solving that problem leaves Claire with yet another, and as it happens Lucas’s murder isn’t the only recent killing that is haunting her. Though the later plot tends to rely on coincidence, there are some surprise twists which are entertaining. There are also dark moments with descriptions of killing, elder abuse and child abuse.

Claire’s childhood experiences, revealed in a series of flashbacks, help to explain her compulsion to kill, and engender some sympathy. Still Claire is a serial killer, and her motives for selecting a victim are generally self-serving and petty. I’m not sure I ever warmed to her exactly, but I did find myself on her side, most of the time.

Told from Claire’s first person perspective, the tone is generally irreverent. I found the humour to be dark and dry, rather than laugh-out-loud funny. There’s some tension in the narrative at times but not really any suspense, however the pace is good.

A quirky, diverting read, You’d Look Better as a Ghost is an engaging debut from Joanna Wallace.

Claire is at the funeral of her father, the only person she adored, when she gets an email bearing wonderful news. A painting she submitted to a competition has been shortlisted for a prize. The euphoria is somewhat short-lived though as she receives a second message from the sender, a chap called Lucas, who has made an error and sent the original message to the ‘wrong Claire.’ Already upset by her bereavement she is not going to take this lying down; Lucas didn’t even manage a genuine apology. It takes no time to track him down, so she heads off to ‘accidently’ come into his orbit and intends to give him more than just a piece of her mind. A meeting which will have serious ramifications for them both.

As well as a budding artist Claire is also a part-time serial killer, one who is rather put out and stroppy, well you would be if you had lost the only person you loved. Lucas learns an important lesson in business, to take care in sending out emails, not that he will be sending out many more.

Claire, like most serial killers, is a complex mixed up character. She was emotionally damaged in childhood, which we see as flashbacks to a series of increasingly upsetting birthday celebrations. It is at this point that we discover she has an uncanny ability to see or at least imagine people as ghosts. She was despised by her mother but doted on by her father, who in a bid to keep his increasingly materialistic wife happy, works longer and longer hours. Here the reader can see just how much he means to Claire, and why when he was ill treated at a care home, she became very angry.

Claire is not a completely heartless killer though as she only kills people who deserve it, albeit as seen through her distorting prism. Within the story this is a useful device as the reader warms to the antics of a serial killer, which is the wrong reaction anywhere but in crime fiction. She is also creative and inventive which surely are admirable traits…

It is a story of unintended consequences, just one measly murder without her trademark meticulous planning and her whole life potentially starts to unravel. She deals with it the only way she knows how to and things begin to escalate out of control. Here clever, intricate plotting pays off, keeping the reader guessing and introducing the unexpected.

The writing style is rather jaunty at times, killings are dealt with in a rather matter of fact way that is not gratuitously gory, almost edging towards farce. Claire has a strangely engaging personality and a real fair for the withering put down, being almost as lethal with her tongue as a hammer. Her cutting observations about her fellow bereaved might have you laughing out loud and her plans for the ‘Vampire Smoker’ green at the gills.

It is not all joyously hammy serial killer with a hammer though, as there are serious moments. This is a novel with genuine emotional depth to it. There are the bereavement counselling sessions, which appear to be a way of introducing an array of strangely diverse characters. Entertaining though they are, grief effects them in different ways and each has a message within. Then there is the care home, and this is portrayed as one of the better ones. Anyone who has experience of the system will recognise the accurate portrayal of the staff and surroundings. As a society we seem to have the attitude of out of sight out of mind and the message that these people become invisible is clear. Dementia is the elephant in the room, something that we would all struggle to deal with and can only be appreciated by first-hand knowledge. This is compassionately written by someone with experience, which is evident, this alone lifts it above being just a jokey serial killer tale.

I would like to thank Net Galley, the Author and Publisher for access to an electronic copy in exchange for a fair review.

5⭐️

AD-PR PRODUCT ~ Blog Tour

A comical, entertaining and blood splattering debut! 👻

Wallace has impressed with this very funny and well plotted thriller. I was hooked throughout and picked up the book every minute that I could.

The book is based around Claire who receives a mistyped email and decides to take matters into her own hands by murdering the sender. Someone’s watching though and Claire knows she must cleanup the mess that she is in.

I mean how could I not be hooked? This read contained gallows humour, murders, bereavement counselling with quite odd characters and a fantastic female lead who had me laughing. The book gave me similar vibes to HTKMAGAWI and I loved it!

The characters were all so different and very well developed. I loved how these characters and the plot worked hand in hand to make a fantastic read. Claire was thoroughly amazing and actually had more intricate layers than I originally thought. I liked the ‘Then’ chapters of her as a little girl with her psychopathic tendencies, and I think her mother was a vile woman. The group at the bereavement counselling worked well too and they all had little quirks about them. Reading Claire’s thoughts and the answers she wishes she could give was brilliant and cleverly written. Claire continuously referring to everyone else as ordinary, as if she doesn’t fit the same box, was also great.

I loved how Wallace incorporated lots of hidden messages and remarks in the book through the use of the plot and the things that Claire thought and said. This was very clever. The topics of dementia and care homes were also handled realistically and appropriately and they added depth to the book.

I really liked how we were given multiple pieces of the puzzle, but didn’t know how they fit together, and how Wallace wrapped the book up perfectly at the end. I want more of Claire! 😂

A huge thank you to @randomthingstours, @netgalley, @viper.books and @jowallaceauthor for having me on the Book Tour! I highly recommend You’d Look Better as a Ghost which is out now! 😍

⚠️ Please check out the trigger warnings! ⚠️

I really really enjoyed this one, it wasn't what I expected at all and I was deliciously surprised by how engaging and funny this book is.
Claire has just lost her father and attends a bereavement group which forces her into engaging with people, a change from her usual quite solitude life. Claire is also a serial killer. Due to grief , her kills get a little sloppy and lack her usual meticulous planning and someone it on to her. The book twists and turns and skips along at a lively pace, sparkling with with and sarcasm. Claire is the first fictional serial killer, I have ever liked and I was rooting for her and her evil ways. The book did veer into slightly too gruesome for me once or twice but the detail was not prolonged, thankfully.

Original, dark and entertaining, I really enjoyed the authors writing style and I look forward to more from her.

4 star.

The story:
Many people find themselves frustrated or angry with the people around them. But not many people deal with this in quite the way Claire does…

Claire is a serial killer, and she has a problem. Because someone seems to know exactly what she is. But who are they, and why haven’t they gone to the police?

From a dysfunctional bereavement counselling group, to a next-door neighbour whose dog definitely doesn’t like her, Claire has her work cut out. Because one thing’s for sure — Claire is not going to be locked away…

My thoughts:
Viper is one of my favourite publishers, with the likes of Catriona Ward and Janice Hallett among their authors. So I was excited to see what this debut novel from Joanna Wallace would be like.

We’re plunged into the story with a flashback scene of a childhood dance recital that shocks the reader to attention immediately. And there’s no letup as we get to know Claire — a serial killer who has been seriously annoyed by a man named Lucas Kane. His death is far from her first killing, but this time something is off, and it becomes clear that someone knows just what Claire is…

If that sounds a bit dark, then that’s because that’s what this book is! But more unexpectedly, it is also hilarious, and intriguing and a wonderful snapshot of human nature, often at its worst. In many ways, Claire isn’t wrong in her assessment of people, and to find yourself sympathising with the point of view of a murderer is somewhat disconcerting!

I had no idea how this book was going to end (or any idea how I wanted it to!), and the twists the author unveils along the way are brilliantly shocking. This is an absolutely fabulous read; quirky and hilarious — highly recommended!