Doug Johnstone
Orenda Books, 13 August 2026
Available as: PB, 257pp audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781917764377
In Ghost Notes, we are three years on from Living is a Problem. Things have changed. Nothing has changed. Thomas, Dorothy's anguished policeman boyfriend, is now in prison and won't respond to her. Maybe the ghost notes are the letters returned, unanswered, from Saughton Prison?
Hannah, Dorothy's granddaughter, and Indy, are married and settled, but about to come under pressure when a bad boy from Indy's past resurfaces. Maybe the ghost notes are things that haven't been spoken between them?
Jenny, perhaps a bit maturer now but still wild and restless, is about to confront a case involving blackmail and adultery that will make her examine herself in more depth than she's perhaps comfortable with. Blackmail letters - well, emails - those could be ghost notes, too?
And there's also the rogue AI that's whispering dangerous messages into the ears of the bereaved, offering easy words that are very different from the ways that the Skelfs try to aid those mourning loved ones - and which may lead to some very bad consequences. Another kind of ghost note, perhaps - one that sets off a crisis at the graveside as the book opens. (I love Johnstone's graveside set pieces, as necessary to these books as the actions sequence that starts a James Bond movie).
None of the "cases" that the Skelfs face in this book is, in itself, very complicated, perhaps - as detective stories they are fairly simple. But as moral studies, ethical mysteries, psychological challenges, they are all formidable. I'm struck by the themes of life and death, of forgetting and remembering, here. Humanity is complex, and we play with human emotions and attachments at our peril. In this book Johnstone juxtaposes the eternal - those neutrinos that Hannah learns about, barely interacting with us at all - with the very mutable flesh that is subject to no end of shocks and will come, at the end, to its end. It's not just our bodies that pass away. Dorothy remembers her life in California, half a century past. Jenny recalls her raucous youth in the Edinburgh of the 80s. Hannah uses the wind phone to call her rotten dad. Rotten, but the only one she had. Each of the Skelf women is living with her younger self - or selves - and as they go about their lives, they can't help but relive the layers of life that are encoded in Edinburgh's streets.
That's true even as the undertaking business transforms the treatment of death for Edinburgh's citizens. This must be a slightly speculative aspect to the book, but I really hope there are now - or will be soon - undertakers in Edinburgh and everywhere else doing water cremations and composting funerals (I would LOVE to be composted!) and regenerating derelict railway sidings into woodland.
Don't take all this talk of death as suggesting that Ghost Notes, and its companion books, are gloomy. Far from it. They are honest, peopled by the most brilliantly drawn characters I have read for ages. This is a series that's growing and benefiting from the depth of character that the preceding books and stories provide. Johnstone has created a rooted set of protagonists. You know how they'll behave, how they'll move and breathe and have their being in a recognisable but strange city - but they still conspire to surprise, they feel like real people, Dorothy with her drums, Jenny tempted by the drink, Hannah more comfortable than before but still, perhaps, uneasy.
Really, really enjoyable. But you'll know that if you're following tis series. If you're not, you should read them in order, but that will be a treat!
