This was an Audible original and included for free with the plus catalogue
🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 1/5 | Steam: 🔥
⚠️ DNF — I got as far as I did on this one purely so I could try to write the review, but I gave up! That should tell you everything.
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read The Garden Grave yet — honestly, maybe don’t. But we’ll be here if you do.
The Opening
I picked this up because it was showing as a popular listen on Audible. I do not know why it is popular. I genuinely do not. I am trying not to be mean but I hated this book so hard that I only kept going so I could write this review. It was free in my subscription and I still feel like I overpaid.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
The Premise
Detective Alec Farnham cannot move past the night his mentor and friend DI Lou Catterick was murdered in a dark alleyway. Her dying word was ghost. A year later the case has gone cold but Alec cannot let it go. A new detective named Kit joins the team the same day a body is found buried beneath a garden ornament at a remote property. Evidence connects the dead man to Lou’s murder, suggesting ghost was a warning rather than a hallucination, somehow… This was in the description of the book, though I honestly don’t know how the two are supposedly connected.
That premise is actually interesting. The execution is another story entirely.
The Narration Problem
Before we even get into the plot let me talk about the narrator because it affected every single thing about this listening experience. I have always struggled with heavy accents in life and in audiobooks and this narrator has a heavy accent that made it genuinely difficult to stay in the story. I had a very hard time understanding him I kept pausing it just to take a break.
But the accent is honestly the least of the problems. There is zero inflection. Zero tone change. Every character, every scene, every line of dialogue comes out in the same flat droning delivery. The narrator makes no distinction between the main characters whatsoever. You cannot tell when someone new is speaking. You cannot tell when you have moved to a different scene. It just drones on and on in the same monotone regardless of what is happening on the page.
BUT here is the truly baffling part. The secondary and tertiary characters — people who appear once and never again — get their own distinct voices!?! What kind of backwards insanity is that? The main characters who are in every single scene get nothing. Why would you give individual voices to the people who barely matter and leave the characters you spend the entire book with completely undifferentiated? I genuinely cannot explain the logic of this decision.
The Plot — What I Could Follow Of It
Jared inherited a property from his father. After a bad run with tenants he goes through a proper letting agency. When he looks at the photos they take, something is off. He compares them to old photos from when his dad was alive and realizes the garden ornaments have been reversed. He investigates, finds disturbed ground, and eventually digs up a body.
Meanwhile Alec and Kit start working the case. The book flips constantly between multiple sets of characters with absolutely no warning and no change in voice to signal the switch. You are mid-scene with one group and suddenly you are somewhere else entirely and you have no idea it happened until three paragraphs in when you realize nothing makes sense and you have to backtrack.
Lisa is Alec’s sister. She is an actress. Simon is a writer. For reasons I never fully understood they decide they are going to become an amateur crime-solving duo to help Alec get answers about Lou’s murder because they are worried about how obsessed he has become. I found this a genuinely strange subplot that the book never justified properly.
Simon visits his grandmother Rebecca for some reason and decides to include her in this investigation, again for some reason that doesn’t make sense to me. Rebecca tells Simon that she had visited a clairvoyant with her friend. The clairvoyant zoneed out and says the word ghost, claiming to have no memory of what just happened. Rebecca goes back and asks the clairvoyant to try to access whatever entity this is again. The clairvoyant is uncomfortable. The clairvoyant then knows another medium who might be willing to go further.
Are we doing paranormal now? I am genuinely asking. We have graffiti that says ghost on the alley wall where Lou was murdered, a clairvoyant channeling something that says ghost, and a body in a garden. I do not know where this is going and I did not care enough to find out.
A suspect named Todd gets ruled out not because of evidence but because he was abused as a child. That is the entire reasoning offered. Apparently that is just how we are handling suspects in this book. We do not need proof. We just decide.
Todd later turns up near the property apparently left there to die of hypothermia, having presumably been coerced into burying the body by whoever actually killed Lou.
Someone spray paints ghost on the wall in the alley where Lou died. A figure in a mask runs off. Nobody really sees anything useful, but this becomes part of their police investigation.
The dead man from the garden is named Decker. There is something about a teenage girl named Maggi who was put in hospital and Lou had to take a statement from her at some point. There is something about Lou’s police academy days and a friend named Jeanine who connects them to someone named Kathy who knew Lou better. I kept waiting for any of this to connect into something coherent. It did not, or if it did I had already zoned out too many times to follow the thread.
By the the time I quit I had no idea who killed Lou. I had no idea what ghost actually meant. I had no idea what the body in the garden had to do with anything beyond a vague evidence connection the book mentioned early on and then seemed to forget about.
I quit. And I say that as someone who tried so hard to sit through the whole thing just to write this review, I just couldn’t do it. Why waste my precious listening ours on a book I clearly hate so much. I do want to add- Nothing bad on the writer- not every book is for every person. And this book just wasn’t for me. I own that. Would it stop me from listening to another of her books? Nope! As long as the premise is interesting and I can understand the narrator.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥 — Zero romance, zero heat. This is a police procedural with paranormal undertones, I guess….? Content warnings for murder, a character left to die of hypothermia, and one of the most aggressively boring listening experiences I have had in recent memory.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
I do not know how it ends because I stopped caring. And I almost finished the book. That is quite an achievement.
Would I Reread It?
If you are asking me that question after reading this review I seriously worry about you.
Who Is This For
I genuinely do not know. It is showing as popular on Audible right now and I cannot explain it. If you love British police procedurals, have no issue with heavy accents, and can tolerate a narrator who delivers every single line in the same flat tone regardless of what is happening in the scene, maybe give it a shot. Just know going in that I hated it and I tried.
Where to get this book
🎧 Audiobook
Audible
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Genre: Crime, Mystery, Police Procedural | Steam: 🔥 | Author: Joy Ellis