A Dark Matter (The Skelfs Book 1)

Three protagonists: seventy-year-old funeral director/private detective, her divorced daughter, and her lesbian granddaughter. The setting is Scotland, and the plots are varied and entangled.Murder mystery is at the center of it all, but not the reason for digging up a couple of graves. It’s dark and funny and strange.

Interesting story. Not quite my usual reading, but I did enjoy it. Would recommend to others who enjoy mystery stories.

Have now read all the Skelf books, all of which are very good, very original in every aspect, enjoyable all the way.

After the death of Edinburgh businessman Jim Skelf, 3 generations of women--grandmother Dorothy, daughter Jenny & Grandaughter Hannah--take over the family funeral home and PI businesses. While coping with bitter losses, they must investigate a mysterious cash outflow, a possible philandering husband, & the disappearance of Hannah's college roommate--all with devastating effects.

A really different kind of mystery. Three scenarios were highlighted and followed to conclusion. The reader learned more about the funeral business than is comfortable to acknowledge.

I liked this. I liked the characters, all strong women but all with failings. Good story. I would read other books in this series.

This is an unusual book because it has elements of the detective genre but also wonderful character development of three generations of women in an unusual family. It won’t remind you of anything else because it’ isn’t like anything else. As soon as I finished it I ordered the next in the series. I recommend it highly.

Very unusual novel/mystery. Not for the faint of heart, however, as there are many graphic details related to death and the funeral business. But lyrical in places as the characters ponder the meaning of life, love, grief, aging, and the connectedness of all things. Can't recall reading anything quite like it in my almost 70 years of avid reading.

I really tried to love this book. It has an interesting premise, an unusual setting (an undertaker's), and I like strong female characters. The trouble with this book was that I found the book quite slow and repetitive, the author wanting us to know how much he knows about particle physics, music, bodies, etc, and these passages took me out of the story. I also found the characters to be unbelievable - I know it's fiction, but as a reader I need to be taken along on their journey and understand why they act as they do, and I just didn't feel that in this book. Sorry.

I found this via a reviewin The Guardian and saw it was praised by Val McDermid and Ian Rankin, so it had big shoes to fill. It did so and then some; I thoroughly enjoyed this slightly quirky take on crime/investigation and I am delighted to find that Doug Johnstone has a back catalogue for me to work through, can only hope his earlier books are of the same standard.The characters were so well drawn, different threads worked in so that they appeared seamless. The standard of writing was excellent, as a pet hate for me is clunky dialogue, together with any need to explain events. I think good writing is that where the plot flows without such a need and this was very much of that quality. I found it hard to put this book down and I love finding this in any novel. Although I enjoyed this as a stand alone book, I do hope it is the start of a series; these characters are too good to be left here!I read a little about the author and discovered such an interesting background, physics and music; who knew ? Loved how it came together here. Hope this does not sound worthy, but not all men writing about women can do as good a job as DJ. Their characters rang true and I agree with the lovely policeman who said the Skelf women were strong; more power to their elbows!

A Dark Matter introduces the Skelf family and three generations of women whose surname is synonymous with death in the city of Edinburgh. With the family home having doubled as a funeral parlour for the last century and a private investigators for the last decade, wife, daughter and granddaughter are laying patriarch, Jim, to rest in a contrary cremation he explicitly requested. But business must go on even with the man at the helm gone, with seventy-year-old widow, Dorothy, divorced adult daughter, Jenny, and twenty-year-old physics student and granddaughter, Hannah, forced to compartmentalise their own grief. A tough ask when there is literally no escape from mortality as they enable other families to process their own personal grief and nigh on impossible when dark secrets from the past emerge and threaten everything they hold dear.As Californian native and compassionate yoga loving widow, Dorothy, takes charge of the funeral side of the business and discovers mysterious monthly payments for the last decade she is devastated to realise that the man she shared everything with lied to her. Forced to question her marriage to Jim and determined to get to the bottom of his duplicity, tenacious Dorothy vows to discover the truth. As bitter and broke middle-aged divorcée, Jenny, comes to terms with being unemployed and moving back home the relatively straightforward sounding adultery case she picks up soon becomes far more complex than simply sitting in the van and tailing her target. Meanwhile overearnest student, Hannah, is hit by a fresh tragedy as her best friend from university, Mel, vanishes. Mired in their own grief and without any option but to go on, all three women are about to be tested to their limit as three investigations are set in motion, alongside a backdrop of funeral proceedings.The premise and the whole set-up of A Dark Matter is something to savour and my disappointment was that the novel proved to be far less exciting than it promised, with sleuthing more akin to the blundering of cosy crime novels. Dorothy’s detective friend, Thomas Olsson, is also on hand to conveniently run DNA tests and interview people willy-nilly making much of what unfolds highly improbable. In this sense apart from some well-placed gallows humour (from Jenny especially) and Johnstone’s realistic attitude to the business of death, the investigations of all three women owe more to a cheesy crime caper. It is only thanks to the plot being so busy that the novel holds the attention as it moves sequentially though each of the trio of women’s individual perspectives and nudges each of their cases onwards ahead of a lively denouement.The narrative throughout leans heavily towards the politically correct with middle-aged white men getting a bad press for starters. Whilst this does not detract from the novel it feels unnecessarily heavy-handed, likewise the constant referencing back to the physics of matter obviously intended to illustrate that we are bit part players in the wider scheme of things. Dorothy was the strongest of the three protagonists to my mind and a character that I empathised with but dissatisfied Jenny and dull Hannah failed to make a significant impression on me.Whilst I hope to read more of the Skelf women’s juggling death and private investigation whilst also managing their own life dramas, I am hoping that future outings will be both darker and their unconventional methods of detection will become more credible! With all three generations learning something about themselves in the aftermath of Jim’s death the next instalment has the potential to build on solid series opener and expand on their characterisation.

Doug Johnstone is fast becoming one of my favourite writers. His previous book, Breakers, was one of my top reads of 2019 and he has pulled it off again with A Dark Matter.I think this book has one of the most original openings I’ve read in a long while. I did have to go over the first two sentences a couple of times as it dawned on me what was happening. Doug Johnstone pulls you into his story with a somewhat disturbing opening as a corpse is being fried. This opening scene grabbed my attention, and I wanted to know what the hell was going on here. But the opening scene isn’t quite as sinister as you might think; there are a lot more sinister scenes to come.In Doug’s last book, I loved the raw, authentic voice he gave to his characters. In this book, we meet a family who own a funeral home, the Skelfs, which also operates as a private detective agency. I really liked this idea. It did give the book a Miss Marple and an Inspector Poirot kind of feeling.Hannah, who is the granddaughter of Dorothy, who now solely owns the business after the death of her husband, Jim, is distraught when her friend Mel disappears. She begins investigating Mel’s disappearance on her own and takes matters into her own hands when it appears that the police show little interest. Hannah is tough and is absolutely determined to find out what has happened to her Mel. But meanwhile, another mystery is taking up her mother’s time. Hannah’s mother, Jenny, has found out that the business is still paying money to the wife of a former employee who also strangely disappeared. She can’t understand why the business is still paying this money and begins to suspect that her father, Jim, may have had a hand in his disappearance. Did he reach an agreement with his former employee’s wife to keep her silent on the matter?I did think that A Dark Matter didn’t have the same, quite high level of tension as Breakers did, but I did become utterly immersed in the story. It is quite a different book, and it does stand out, it’s hard to place it into just one genre. Doug really captures Hannah’s anger as she searches for answers behind Mel’s disappearance, and also in Jenny’s despair, as she tries to work out what has been going on behind her back within the business. Doug Johnstone has a real talent for giving his characters strong, emotional depth which really brings them to life and makes them feel like real people.You will be rooting for the characters to reach the answers that they are desperately craving. A Dark Matter is a totally original novel that will have you begging for the next chapter in the series. Fantastic writing!

This book is so good its my first 5 star rating of the year! It follows the story of the Skelf family who run a funeral parlour with a private investigation business on the side in Edinburgh. When the man of the house Jim dies he leaves his wife, daughter and granddaughter in a world of secrets and lies as they wrestle with their own grief and the murky business they've now been left to manage.The book is extremely well written and the plot is excellent. All the characters are relatable and I felt myself genuinely loving or raging at people in the story as I was so immersed in it. I heard about the book in a list of Scottish fiction by The Scottish Book Trust and I'm so glad I decided to pick it up. I've already started the second book The Big Chill and I'll be preordering the third book when its available as its out in August!!Pick it up you won't regret it :)