Today I am so excited to be sharing my review for the blog tour of Ghost Notes. It’s written with thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me on the blog tour and to Orenda Books for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

The Skelf women have been keeping their heads down, running the family’s funeral directors and private investigation businesses. But when a woman collapses at her husband’s funeral and is saved by Dorothy, she finds herself drawn into the murky world of ‘grief tech’ – a booming new industry that creates digital avatars of the dead.

Jenny’s latest case – a simple blackmail job for an old school friend – quickly spirals into chaos as the woman’s tangled love life pulls Jenny towards dangerous old habits.

Meanwhile, Hannah and her wife, Indy, are confronted by the unexpected arrival of Indy’s ex-boyfriend, claiming to be dying and eager for the Skelfs to arrange his funeral. But his arrival uncovers more ghosts from the past, and threatens to upend everything they’ve built.

As their cases collide and their personal lives spiral, the Skelfs face danger from all sides. How far will they go to protect one another, and what will it cost to finally silence the ghosts?

Warm, tense and full of heart, Ghost Notes is another masterful instalment in Doug Johnstone’s award-winning, addictive Skelfs series, and the stakes are higher than ever…

Review:

I’m assuming I’ve made it clear by now how much I absolutely love this series. The Skelfs, Dorothy, Jenny and Hannah, and their family and colleagues feel like family to me and it’s always great to catch up with them. Ghost Notes was also a delight to read. 

The perspective in Ghost Notes switches regularly between the three Skelf women and this remains a really effective technique. Despite being three generations of the same family, they’re all very different and the separate chapters allow me to see what is happening from different viewpoints and get a broader picture of the story. It amazes me how even after seven books, Doug Johnstone can still find an extra layer to these characters and make them even more relatable and likeable. 

The chapters in Ghost Notes are usually very short and this makes the novel very fast paced and easy to read. It is a crime novel, and the crime elements of the story are intriguing and I wanted to find out the outcomes of the cases they were investigating. These become quite tense as they progress and I found it difficult to put my Kindle away, especially towards the end. 

However, unusually for me, it is not the crime aspect of Ghost Notes that fascinates me. The Skelfs are dealing with multiple cases at one time, and this gives Doug Johnstone the opportunity to cover several different themes and political and social issues. It is these that really resonate with me, making me care about the characters and the often tragic situations in which they find themselves. I am often left to consider my own beliefs around a particular issue, and it is this, for me, that makes this series stand out in the crime genre. 

Doug Johnstone is still planting seeds for how the series might continue, and I really hope there is more to come because I still feel these ladies have more to give us.

Ghost Notes is available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here: