The Running Grave - Facts

 Chapman Farm, where the church is located, is in Aylmerton. Norfolk. Aylmerton  is a village in the county of Norfolk and lies 3.5 km south of the North Sea.

The book refers to Storm Katie, which happened on Easter Monday. Storm Katie was a powerful extratropical cyclone that battered large parts of the UK on March 27–28, 2016, at the end of a busy Easter bank holiday weekend.

The book also mentions the Brexit election. The 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, commonly referred to as the EU referendum or the Brexit referendum, was a referendum that took place on Thursday 23 June 2016 in the United Kingdom (UK) and Gibraltar to ask the electorate whether the country should continue to remain a member of, or leave, the European Union (EU). The result was a vote in favour of leaving the EU, triggering calls to begin the process of the country's withdrawal from the EU commonly termed "Brexit".

Cormoran's uncle, Ted, lives in St Mawes, Cornwall. St Mawes is a village on the end of the Roseland Peninsula, in the eastern side of Falmouth harbour, on the south coast of Cornwall.

Daiyu is said to have drowned in Cromer. Cromer is a coastal town and civil parish on the north coast of the North Norfolk district of the county of Norfolk.

Cormoran and Robin go to interview Cherie in Northbury, where she lives. Northbury is an electoral ward in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham.

Cormoran goes to confront Waze at the Olympia. Olympia Events, formerly known as Olympia London and sometimes referred to as the Olympia Exhibition Centre, was a dedicated exhibition centre, event space and conference centre in West Kensington.

Daiyu's appearance was possible because they did a trick, pepper's ghost. The Pepper's ghost illusion is a 19th-century stagecraft technique that uses a translucent, reflective surface angled at 45 degrees to make objects or people appear, disappear, or seem semi-transparent. Named after scientist John Henry Pepper, who popularized it in 1862, it is often mistakenly called a hologram, though it relies entirely on classic reflection geometry.