A faked death, an obsessive stalker, an old man claiming he's being abused by the ghost of his late wife, and a devastating spectre from the past. The Skelfs are back in another explosive thriller, and this time things are more than personal...'If you loved Iain Banks, you'll devour the Skelfs series' Erin Kelly‘Nobody portrays modern Edinburgh better than Doug Johnstone. I love The Skelfs' Val McDermid_________________________________________Death is just the beginning...The Skelf women live in the shadow of death every day, running the family funeral directors and private investigator business in Edinburgh. But now their own grief interwines with that of their clients, as they are left reeling by shocking past events.A fist-fight by an open grave leads Dorothy to investigate the possibility of a faked death, while a young woman's obsession with Hannah threatens her relationship with Indy and puts them both in mortal...

Running private investigator and funeral home businesses means trouble is never far away, and the Skelf women take on their most perplexing, chilling cases yet in book two of this darkly funny, devastatingly tense and addictive new series!Haunted by recent events, the Skelf women are hoping for a quieter life. But running both a funeral directors and a PI business means trouble is never far away, and when a car crashes into the open grave at a funeral that Dorothy is conducting, she can't help looking into the dead driver's shadowy life.While Dorothy begins to uncover a dark truth at the heart of Edinburgh society, her daughter Jenny and granddaughter Hannah have their own struggles to deal with. Jenny's ex-husband Craig is making plans that could shatter the Skelf women's lives, and the increasingly obsessive Hannah has formed a friendship with an elderly teacher that is fast turning deadly.Something even more sinister lurks around the corner when a drumming student of Dorothy's...

Three generations of women from the Skelfs family take over the family funeral-home and PI businesses in the first book of a taut, page-turning and darkly funny new series.Meet the Skelfs: well-known Edinburgh family, proprietors of a long-established funeral-home business, and private investigators... When patriarch Jim dies, it's left to his wife Dorothy, daughter Jenny and granddaughter Hannah to take charge of both businesses, kicking off an unexpected series of events.Dorothy discovers mysterious payments to another woman, suggesting that Jim wasn't the husband she thought he was. Hannah's best friend Mel has vanished from university, and the simple adultery case that Jenny takes on leads to something stranger and far darker than any of them could have imagined.As the women struggle to come to terms with their grief, and the demands of the business threaten to overwhelm them, secrets from the past emerge, which change everything...A compelling,...

A pulsatingly tense, deeply moving psychological thriller from the Number One BESTSELLING Scottish author of Fault Lines ‘A cracking and highly original thriller. Johnstone never fails to deliver' Mark Billingham ‘This may be Doug Johnstone's best book yet. An unsparing yet sympathetic depiction of Edinburgh's ignored underclass, with terrific characterisation. Tense, pacey, filmic' Ian Rankin 'It's as psychologically rich as it is harrowing. I've come to expect nothing less from Doug Johnstone, one of the genre's premiere writers' Megan AbbottA toxic family … a fight for survival… Seventeen-year-old Tyler lives in one of Edinburgh's most deprived areas. Coerced into robbing rich people's homes by his bullying older siblings, he's also trying to care for his little sister and his drug-addict mum. On a job, his brother Barry stabs a homeowner and leaves...

Four friends, one weekend, gallons of whisky. What could go wrong?Driven by amateur whisky-nut Adam, four late-thirties ex-university mates are heading to Islay - the remote Scottish island world famous for its single malts - with a wallet full of cash, a stash of coke and a serious thirst.Over a weekend soaked in the finest cask strength spirit, they meet young divorcee Molly, who Adam has a soft spot for, her little sister Ash who has all sorts of problems and Molly's ex-husband Joe, a control freak who also happens to be the local police. As events spiral out of control, they are all thrown into a nightmare that gets worse at every turn.A wild trip to the Scottish Highlands, Doug Johnstone's debut on the Faber crime list is a classic violent thriller, doused with black humour.

Driving home from a party with his girlfriend and brother, all of them drunk and high on stolen pills, Billy Blackmore accidentally hits someone in the night. In a panic, they all decide to drive off. But the next day Billy wakes to find he has to cover the story for the local paper. It turns out the dead man was Edinburgh's biggest crime lord and, as Billy struggles with what he's done, he is sucked into a nightmare of guilt, retribution and violence. From the author of the acclaimed Smokeheads, Hit & Run is another pitch-black psychological thriller.

Brilliantly constructed speculative crime fictionA classic whodunitDark psychological suspenseDoug Johnstone returns with his most explosive and original thriller yet...A little lie ... a seismic secret ... and the cracks are beginning to show...In a reimagined contemporary Edinburgh, where a tectonic fault has opened up to produce a new volcano in the Firth of Forth, and where tremors are an everyday occurrence, volcanologist Surtsey makes a shocking discovery. On a clandestine trip to new volcanic island The Inch, to meet Tom, her lover and her boss, she finds his lifeless body, and makes the fatal decision to keep their affair, and her discovery, a secret. Desperate to know how he died, but also terrified she'll be exposed, Surtsey's life quickly spirals into a nightmare when someone makes contact – someone who claims to know what she's done...

Meet Martha. It's the first day of her new job as intern at Edinburgh'sThe Standard. But all's not well at the ailing newspaper, and Martha is carrying some serious baggage of her own.Put straight onto the obituary page, she takes a call from a former employee who seems to commit suicide while on the phone, something which echoes with her own troubled past.Setting in motion a frantic race around modern-day Edinburgh,The Dead Beat traces Martha's desperate search for answers to the dark mystery of her parents' past. Soundtracked by and interspersed with a series of gigs from the alternative music scene of her parents' generation in the early '90s, Doug Johnstone's latest page-turner is a wild ride of a thriller, and a perfect follow-on to his #1 Kindle bestseller, Hit & Run.

'It's just to say that no-one has come to pick Nathan up from school, and we were wondering if there was a problem of some kind?' As Mark Douglas photographs a pod of whales stranded in the waters off Edinburgh's Portobello Beach, he is called by his son's school: his wife, Lauren, hasn't turned up to collect their son. Calm at first, Mark collects Nathan and takes him home but as the hours slowly crawl by he increasingly starts to worry. With brilliantly controlled reveals, we learn some of the painful secrets of the couple's shared past, not least that it isn't the first time Lauren has disappeared. And as Mark struggles to care for his son and shield him from the truth of what's going on, the police seem dangerously short of leads. That is, until a shocking discovery...

An adrenaline-charged thriller from the Kindle-bestselling author of Gone Again and Hit and Run.'An unnerving tale of what happens to ordinary lives when the wheels come off.' VAL MCDERMID'A haunting, unforgettable page-turner that ticks every excellence box in crime writing.' ALANNA KNIGHTSitting in the departure lounge of Kirkwall Airport, Finn Sullivan just wants to get off Orkney. But then he meets the mysterious and dangerous Maddie Pierce, stepping in to save her from some unwanted attention, and his life is changed forever.Set against the brutal, unforgiving landscape of Orkney, CRASH LAND is a psychological thriller steeped in guilt, shame, lust, deception and murder.