Blogtour review - Ghost Notes by Doug Johnstone

Ghost Notes (Skelfs, 8)
Doug Johnstone
Orenda Books, 13 August 2026
Available as: PB, 257pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781917764377

I'm grateful to Orenda for sending me a copy of Ghost Notes to consider for review, and to Anne for inviting me to join the book's blogtour. That's really appreciated.

I always enjoy Johnstone's Skelfs books. Ostensibly mysteries, the rich setting - three generations of women operating a business in Edinburgh as undertakers and private investigators - gives Johnstone vast scope to explore personal histories, dilemmas and relations. So much so that the crime aspect almost vanishes and instead you have these women, living their lives, coming to terms with who they are, facing challenges, and reflecting on youth, age and change.  Every page is a joy, every train of thought a delight. And of course the location, Edinburgh, adds its own layer of wonder too.

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!

For more information about Ghost Notes, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Ghost Notes from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Blogtour #Review - The Opposite of Lonely by Doug Johnstone

The Opposite of Lonely (The Skelfs, 5)
Doug Johnstone
Orenda Books, 28 September 2023
Available as: PB, 276pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781914585807 

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for sending me a copy of The Opposite of Lonely to consider for review, and to Anne for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

It's great to welcome the Skelfs back, three generations of women who run an undertakers and act as private investigators in modern Edinburgh. Over the four previous books readers of this series will have come to regard them as friends, the stories as notable for their nuanced and gentle relationships between them as for the crime plots and twists (of which Johnstone is however an absolute master). 

Dorothy, Jenny and Hannah are faced here with as puzzling a collection of mysteries as they have encountered before - and ones where personal issues are entwined with professional challenges. 

Anti Traveller prejudice raises its head as a caravan is burned down after the firm provide a sendoff for one of the community. A stranger haunts funerals in the city. What is he up to, and what can be done about him? Jenny - whose ex sister-in-law set fire to the funeral parlour, stole her brother's body, and vanished - is asked to find the missing woman. And Hannah, still wrestling with her PhD, is investigating threats to Scotland's first woman astronaut and her wife (who seems to think she "came back wrong" from the International Space Station).

These cases are entwined with the firm's routine work: helping the bereaved to send off their loved ones, and sometimes standing in when the dead have nobody to mourn. For this last act in their existence on  Earth, Grandmother Dorothy, mother/ daughter Jenny and granddaughter/ daughter/ wife Hannah believe that everybody should be the opposite of lonely.

I read this book with a strong degree of personal buy-in. My mother died suddenly a few months ago. Her funeral was the first one I'd had to arrange, and I was very sensitive reading this book to the degree to which Johnstone has the Skelfs negotiate real issues at a time when, with grief raw, their customer will have no real guiderails. He's clearly done his research in this, and to me, does a magnificent job recognising the feelings that will flow: grief, guilt, loss, the sense of endings and lost opportunities. As The Opposite of Lonely makes clear, the Skelf women are themselves still mourning various losses too.

The mystery aspects of this book are, as ever, skilfully designed and turn out not to be random acts but to be deeply and plausibly rooted in the characters that Johnstone develops. The Skelf family (and I'm including Hannah's wife Indy here) have developed,  or perhaps I should say, grown, through Johnstone's previous books so that they are reliable emotional gauges of what's going on. We know how they will react to particular things, to threats or opportunities that approach, so we can judge the emotional pitch of the story by their responses. And as the three women have somewhat different outlooks - Dorothy, approaching the end of her life, rather elegiac, Jenny seething, still battling her demons, Hannah rather perplexed by the life before her - we'll get their slightly different takes on everything. Like Feynman diagrams, the full result is only reached by adding up these different contributions. Or perhaps, it's as if Johnstone projects the emotions of the story with a variety of notes, not just one, or perhaps, as if he's giving us a hologram, not just a flat photograph? (I hope all this makes sense!)

Of course, as a Skelfs story, this isn't all about emotional depth and resonance, though they are there, there's also action and peril, and indeed one of the most nailbiting conclusions I can remember in this series, one which opens up some new possibilities going forward.

What else? Well I still miss poor Einstein, of course, I was glad to see Dorothy as driven with her social mission here as with her business (Johnstone thereby giving us I hope a new regaular character who I'll enjoy finding out more about in future) and, of course, the heartbeat of Edinburgh life drums throughout the book, an accompaniment to Dorothy's playing.

In short, another Skelf masterpiece.

For more information about The Opposite of Lonely, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour, which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Opposite of Lonely from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.