Blog tour: Ghost Notes by Doug Johnstone

This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.

‘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.’

When you’ve been following an ongoing series for a while, you just know that – unless something has somehow gone catastrophically wrong – you’ll enjoy the next instalment. And so it proves: I found Ghost Notes, the seventh book in Doug Johnstone’s Skelfs series, an absorbing comfort read.

Maybe “comfort” is a strange word to associate with a novel covering addiction, suicide, extortion, murder, and more besides but, as always, the Skelf women (and the partners and employees they’ve gathered along the way) are at the centre, bending but never quite breaking.

I have such strong mental images of Dorothy, Jenny, and Hannah at this point, it’s like slipping back among old friends. This, and their continual efforts to do the right thing – whether that’s practicing environmentally-conscious body disposition, giving those who died alone decent send-offs, welcoming strangers (particularly in Dorothy’s case), or giving tough love to their clients when it’s needed – make it a pleasure to return to their version of Edinburgh.

Of all the themes that arise in Ghost Notes, addiction is common to all three women’s storylines. Dorothy discovers that a funeral client who died by suicide was addicted to interacting with an AI version of his dead teenage daughter, and sets out to hold the “grief tech” company behind it to account; a chance encounter prompts Jenny to face up to her unhealthy relationship with alcohol; and Hannah learns that her wife (and long-time Skelf employee) Indy had a whole other life she’s never told anyone about, involving drug dependence and other heavy experiences.

The “grief tech” storyline especially captured my imagination. For one thing – as Dorothy herself muses – having an AI avatar of someone who’s died might be helpful at first, but if you keep going back to it, it’s going to be harder, or even impossible to move on, plus it’s in the interests of the company running the service to keep you on as a subscriber. And that’s without the avatar going rogue and convincing the bereaved to take their own life!

For another, I find the idea that someone creating an AI avatar of me after I die really creepy. I know I won’t be here to care, and an inevitable aspect of death is losing all influence over what happens to your body and how you’re represented, but the thought of “living on”, not as my full, complex self, but how someone else perceived me and/or wanted me to be, and moving and talking in ways I might never have in life: eugh.

In Ghost Notes, the avatar is of Millie, who died of cancer in her mid/late teens. Millie Bot seems programmed to always be friendly and in want of her (its?) dad’s company (to the extent of begging him to join her in the “Afterglow”) in a way she probably wouldn’t have been as a living person weathering both adolescence and cancer treatment. She’s also doomed to stay the same age and wear the same clothes (presumably ones her dad particularly approved of) while biological Millie’s peers continue growing up, and fashion moves on. I like to think the “real” Millie would have found it pretty cringe as well.

Ghost Notes is a big-hearted and thought-provoking addition to the Skelfs series.