Description
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 their past, the Skelf women are hoping for a quieter life. But running both a funeral directors’ and a private investigation business means trouble is never far away, and when a car crashes into the open grave at a funeral that matriarch Dorothy is conducting, she can’t help looking into the dead driver’s shadowy life. While Dorothy uncovers a dark truth at the heart of Edinburgh society, her daughter Jenny and granddaughter Hannah have their own struggles.
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 professor that is fast turning deadly. But something even more sinister emerges when a drumming student of Dorothy’s disappears and suspicion falls on her parents. The Skelf women find themselves sucked into an unbearable darkness – but could the real threat be to themselves?
Following three women as they deal with the dead, help the living and find out who they are in the process, The Big Chill follows A Dark Matter, book one in the Skelfs series, which reboots the classic PI novel while asking the big existential questions, all with a big dose of pitch-black humour.
Tracey Harriman –
Three generations of Skelf women are running both a Funeral Director’s and a Private Detective Agency. We were introduced to them in Johnstone’s first book of the series, A Dark Matter, and here their stories continue.
The story starts with a bang – literally – as a car crashes into the open grave where Dorothy (matriarch of the family) is conducting a Funeral service. As if this isn’t tragic enough, the driver of the car is killed instantly, and so begins a case for the Detective Agency in identifying the dead man.
I read A Dark Matter earlier in the year, and, although the book was well written, as I work for a Funeral Director’s myself, several times I found I was thinking ‘well that would never happen’. Not unlike a nurse watching Holby City, I imagine! Of course, it is a novel, and therefore some artistic licence should be accepted. I really didn’t find that at all with The Big Chill, although I know that with any future Funerals I conduct in a cemetery I will be keeping a furtive eye on the entrance!
There is a lot going on in this book – and that is in no way a criticism – with Funerals to arrange, and several cases for Skelf ladies to investigate. Fast paced and full of drama without feeling overwhelming. A fair amount of Funeral Director humour in there too.
Although this book could be read as a ‘stand alone’ I really would advise reading A Dark Matter first of all as this does help give a clearer perspective on a continuing story and an understanding of how and why the Skelf women are doing, well, what they are doing.
Of course there are other characters within the book, but it is the Skelf women and their relationships with each other that draws the greatest interest. They all have their own vulnerabilities and scars (emotional and physical) but it is these vulnerabilities from which they also draw their strength.
A truly gripping, dramatic and dark novel that I struggled to put down – actually I didn’t struggle to put it down, I just struggled to get anything else done for several hours – and a series that I’m looking forward to reading the next instalment of.
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