Undiscovered Scotland

 

Your best mate just fell off a cliff in mysterious circumstances and you were the last person to see him alive, what do you do? Well, if you're David Lindsay from Arbroath, you get the hell out of there and don't return. Not for at least fifteen years. Until Nicola Cruickshank, yes, that Nicola, the girl you always fancied but never had the guts to approach, gets in touch and asks, no, demands, that you go back for a school reunion. To the place where it happened. The place you've been running from for fifteen years.

Of course you go. Not to belatedly lay your mate to rest, but because you still fancy Nicola. The thing is, if you are David Lindsay, then returning to Arbroath isn't going to lay any ghosts to rest. And when someone else takes a dive off the cliffs while David's there, an act the locals have taken to calling tombstoning, he has a choice: run away again, or finally find out why people keep dying around him...

Doug Johnstone's first novel moves along at an engaging pace, and you find yourself becoming increasingly involved with the two main characters, David and Nicola, as they in turn become increasingly involved with each other. Meanwhile, events build towards a climax that has a sense of inevitability about it but nonetheless succeeds in being genuinely exciting. And in the background you become drawn into some perennial Scottish issues about small towns and the people who grow up in them, the people who leave them, and what it's like to return.