Today I’m joining the blog tour for Tombstoning. My review is written with thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me on the tour and to Orenda Books for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

Your best mate just fell off a cliff in mysterious circumstances. You were the last person to see him alive. What do you do?

If you’re David Lindsay from Arbroath, you leg it – and don’t go back. Not for fifteen years.

Then Nicola Cruickshank – yes, that Nicola, the girl you always fancied but never had the guts to speak to – gets in touch. She wants you back for a school reunion. At the very place it happened. Of course you say yes. Not to lay ghosts to rest, but because you still fancy Nicola.

The thing is, if you are David Lindsay, then returning to Arbroath isn’t going to bring closure. Because when someone else tumbles off the cliffs – an act the locals now call tombstoning – David has a choice: run away again, or finally find out why people around him keep dying…

Review:

I’ve read most of Doug Johnstone books now so I was really excited to have the opportunity to go back to where it all started and read his debut novel. I loved it! It has everything you would expect from Doug Johnstone: brilliantly constructed characters, a wonderful sense of place and some incredibly tense situations!

Tombstoning is set mostly around Arbroath in Scotland. This is an area I’ve never visited before, but Doug Johnstone’s descriptions are very detailed and gave me wonderful insights into the places where the central characters used to hang around in their youth. This really enhances the sense of nostalgia that permeates the whole novel.

The central characters, David and Nicola are not particularly flashy and they’re not people who would stand out in a crowd; however, despite this, I still found it easy to become involved in their story. Like David, I find the idea of a school reunion quite horrible, and I also experienced the death of a friend at a young age, albeit in different circumstances, and for various reasons, find it quite difficult to visit the area where I grew up. I found quite a lot to relate to in him, and therefore I was rooting for him to find the answers he needed.

I did guess the ending of Tombstoning, but this in no way spoilt how it played out. There is so much tension, and my heartbeat grew faster with every chapter, as I tried to work out what their route to escape would be.

This was a fantastic trip back in time, and as always, I am looking forward to seeing what Doug Johnstone does next!

Tombstoning is available from Amazon.

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